Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 1–6, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00130.x
[Please note: the three articles referred to in this editorial (Segal, Shuxian and van Binsbergen) are published in Volume 3, Issue 2].
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EDITORIAL
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Myth, Theory and Area Studies
Daniela Merolla* and Mineke Schipper
Leiden University, the Netherlands
Introduction
What questions does the study of myth raise in the new century? What
have we learned from the study of myth over the past few centuries? What
is the present relationship between myth, theory and area studies? These
questions are addressed in the essays in this symposium.1
Comparison has been crucial to the study of myth since the nineteenth
century, when evolutionism and diffusionism, and, in reaction to them,
functionalism and structuralism, generated the ‘grand narratives’ of human
development. The focus was on the similarities among myths worldwide.
Theories, which came above all from the newly emerged social sciences,
sought to explain why myths were present all over the world. An explanation that encompassed all myths had to concentrate on what made all
myths alike and to ignore, though not to deny, what made individual myths
distinctive. The term ‘comparative method’ was taken to refer to accounts
of only the similarities among myths. One operated comparatively not to
learn how one myth or set of myths were unique but to learn how they
were the same.
That human beings, and therefore their artefacts, have much in common
is undeniable. Any aspect of a culture, not just its myths, is a specific, local
form of something found in other cultures as well. What was long ago
called ‘the psychic unity of mankind’ doubtless still holds. The question
is whether differences still deserve a place. At one extreme stand cognitive
scientists, who maintain that differences are overridden in importance by
common mental processes. A pivotal element of the cognitive view is the
emphasis on universal and ‘pancultural’ processes that underlie human
behaviour (see, for example, Pinker 1995).
At the other extreme stand postmodernists, who maintain that crosscultural comparisons and the search for general principles should not
override the actor’s point of view in narrating myths or the researcher’s
own point of view in analyzing myths. If it was already clear long before
postmodernism that myths, along with artistry, had to do with authority
and power, it is now even clearer that the silenced voices in or behind
myths must be identified. Moreover, the researcher does not work with a
distant abstraction but invariably brings to bear the researcher’s own experience and culture. We tend to explore the unexplored in terms of what
we know.
© 2009 The Authors
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
2 Daniela Merolla and Mineke Schipper
Attentiveness to the local and the subjective bears on long-standing
issues in the study of myth – notably, the issues of definition and classification. Classical mythology, together with Christian concepts of religion
and with modern Western concepts of history and science, has provided
the framework within which mythology has been analyzed. Narratives
were considered myths if the stories were deemed true by those who
narrated them and were about gods and other supernatural beings. In
other words, myths had to mean ‘sacred narratives.’
It is easy, too easy, to lodge accusations of ethnocentrism, colonialism,
and prejudice in the study of myth. But does it make sense to adopt
would-be universal definitions and theories that in fact stem from local
contexts? This concern is scarcely new. A classic question in the study of
myth is whether to accept the standard classification of narrative genres
into myth, legend and folktale. Is a universal definition or theory possible?
What is the sense of applying universal concepts and explanations? Should
we not rather reverse the process and start from the categories of each
culture?
When we do start with individual cultures, we discover that the
conventionally assumed genres and classifications by no means hold
everywhere. Cultures may assume the conventional categories but allow
for blurrier distinctions. Or categorisations may hold only tacitly and not
be named. Or cultures may have categories all their own. In any event
the subtlety and complexity of the material requires close cooperation
between local research and comparative theorising.
The study of myths in Africa provides an example of this complex
relationship between area studies and universal theorising. In the1980s and
1990s, the debate over the presence or absence of myths in Africa assumed
a definition of myth that in fact was based on Greek and Indo-European
mythology:
Myths are prose narratives which, in the society in which they are told, are considered
to be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past [ . . . ] They may recount
the activities of deities, their love affairs, their family relationships, their friendships and enmities, their victories and defeats. (W. R. Bascom 1965, p. 4)
In Oral Literature in Africa Ruth Finnegan, a famous specialist in the
field of African oral literatures, argued that even those African stories that
could be identified as myths by this definition were difficult to pinpiont
because they were not always told as narratives but had to be reconstructed from other oral genres and even from sources like architecture
and decorated objects:
Myths in the strict sense are by no means common in African oral literature.
. . . It is true that many [narratives] have an aetiological element . . . but they
do not necessarily also possess the other attributes of ‘myths’ – their authoritative nature and the way in which they are accepted as serious and truthful
© 2009 The Authors
Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 1–6, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00130.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Editorial
3
accounts. It is seldom, also, that we seem to find narratives depicting the
activities of deities. (Finnegan 1970, p. 362)
Thereafter another prominent scholar, Isidore Okpewho, objected that
Finnegan, like others before her, was denying the existence of myths in
Africa on the basis of an ethnocentric definition of myth. According to him,
a more appropriate definition needed to take into consideration the function
and aesthetic elements of myth as well as the effects of myth-retelling on
the audience. Okpewho criticises not only universal narrative genre classifications – such as the divisions into myth, legend and folktale – but also
classifications that are meant to be exclusively African when the classifications ignore the processes and productions involved. He looks instead at
the continuum of the creative approach to reality, which he calls ‘fancy’.
Myth is not really a particular type of a tale against another; . . . it is simply
that quality of fancy that informs the creative or configurative powers of the
human mind in varying degrees of intensity’. ‘Myth is the irreducible aesthetic
substratum in all varieties of human cultural endeavour, from one generation to
another. (Okpewho 1983, pp. 69, 70)
Under this aspect, African myths do exist, and the debate prompted R.
Finnegan to revise her definition in later works (Finnegan 1992, pp. 146–148).
Although from a different perspective, Okpewho’s definition seems to
converge with that of others from other fields, such as the social anthropologist P. S. Cohen and the historian of religions A. Brelich, for all of
whom the mythopoeic approach (productive of myth) creates and establishes the reality of storytellers and audience through the narration itself:
Le mythe n’explique rien, il ne fait que raconter’ ‘c’est le règne de la pure
contingence naturelle – incommensurable et inacceptable à la pensée humaine
– à laquelle le mythe soustrait ce qui est importante pour l’homme. (Brelich
1970, pp. 24, 26)
Thus, I would argue, one of the important functions of myth is that it anchors
the present in the past. This is done by establishing a dramatically significant
series of events. (Cohen 1969, pp. 349–350)
More recently, studies of myth have focused on the contemporary
adaptations and changes of oral and written storytelling. A field of growing
interest, for example, has been the processes of empowerment or disempowerment of individuals and groups linked to the telling of mythical
narratives, especially in new social and historical contexts. The emergence
of new kinds of media, such as the internet, has led to amazing means of
storytelling, but it has also raised concerns about hybridisation and about
cultural loss and gain; new theories of myth may be needed to cover these
technological changes.
At the same time, the discussion of universality and particularity has
turned into the effort of understanding differences instead of erecting
insurmountable dichotomies.
© 2009 The Author
Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 1–6, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00130.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
4 Daniela Merolla and Mineke Schipper
The articles presented in this symposium tackle the above-mentioned
problems about comparison, myth definition, power and contending
voices from various points of views and across various disciplines.
In ‘Myth and Science’ Robert Segal approaches myth from the standpoint of theory. He considers one of the key questions raised by theorists:
What is the function of myth? He focuses on what in the nineteenth
century had commonly been assumed to be the main and even sole
function of myth: accounting for events in the physical world – why the
sun rises and sets, why rain falls, why trees grow, and why living things,
including human beings, are born and die. The answer was a decision of
a god. Mythology was tied to religion. Segal argues that the function
ascribed to myth by nineteenth-century theorists doomed myth, for science,
by now the commonplace explanation of physical events, could explain
them at least as well. More to the point, moderns were born into a
scientific culture. Myth had to try to find a place amidst science. Segal
argues that modern science doomed myth by rendering it not merely
superfluous but incompatible.
By contrast, Segal argues that theorists of myth in the twentieth century
recharacterised the function of myth to make it distinct from that of
science and thereby make myth compatible with science. He also notes
that, alternatively, twentieth-century theorists recharacterised the meaning
of myth to make it compatible with science. Myth was no longer to be
read literally and so was no longer to be assumed even to be referring to
the physical world in the first place.
Segal then considers a contemporary attempt to restore myth to the
physical world: the personification and even worship of the earth as Gaia.
He considers whether this myth, which itself goes back to ancient times,
manages to reconcile myth with science – the approach of the twentieth
century – while keeping the subject and even the function of myth
scientific-like – the assumption of the nineteenth century. Segal contrasts
the deference to science shown by both twentieth- and nineteenth-century
theorists of myth to the easy dismissal of science shown by postmodernism.
In ‘Myths of China’ Ye Shuxian discusses first the traditional Chinese
wariness towards mythology, a wariness that he contends is rooted in
Confucianism. As, apparently, part of a gradual opening by China to
Western ideas, mythology in the twentieth century became a proper subject
of study and was even supported by the government. Ye Shuxian distinguishes between traditional Chinese respect for male rulers and traditional
scepticism towards female ones, if any there were. That disparity in status
had mythological consequences. On the one hand there were, or at least
there survive, far fewer myths of female gods than myths of male gods.
On the other hand female gods come to lose either their femininity or
their power.
Coming from a Chinese tradition of scholarship, Ye Shuxian draws our
attention to the fact that in Han script the very character referring to
© 2009 The Authors
Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 1–6, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00130.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
Editorial
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‘god/body’ has female connotations. In other words, originally the capacity
to bear children was directly associated with creativity, as visually reflected
in the character for this concept. He argues that these connotations reveal
early Chinese views of divinities as rather female than male. He believes
that myths of female gods might well be linked to an early matriarchal
stage in Chinese history. In a later phase of history either those female
gods got completely lost or they lost their primordial role, so that, according
to him, their function in later myths changed drastically. Ye Shuxian notes
the centrality accorded to myths of female gods by the Jungian scholar
Erich Neumann.
Van Binsbergen then offers his own distinctive approach to myth, one
that combines what might be called the outsider’s point of view with the
insider’s. Most theories assume a critical, sceptical, reductive approach to
myth, and risk to dissolve the existence (and sense) of the myth by replacing
it with ‘more valid truths characterised by scientific rationality, objectivity
and universality’. The theorist would know better than the person whose
myth it is. Van Binsbergen does not reject the scientific approach. He
rejects it as the only approach. He proposes a balance between it and an
alternative approach, that of the person – better, the culture – with the
myth. He strives to combine what he calls ‘rupture’ with what he calls
‘fusion’: ‘deconstructing’ myth with ‘celebrating’ myth. To approach myth
in this double way would be to succeed in reconciling theory with area
studies. This would occur when anthropologists temporarily adopt the
owners’ ceremonial or ritual enactment of myth, or when literary analysts
accept the emblematic value and deep truth of ancient myths re-enacted
in latter-day texts. Van Binsbergen’s paper yet warns the readers that ‘fusion’
can only be carried out in a constantly renovating tension created by
the (apparently contradictory) adoption and celebration of myths in the
critical scientist stance.
Short Biographies
Daniela Merolla’s research focuses on African oral literary productions and
their interactions with written literatures in African and European
languages. She specialised in Intercultural Comparative Literature and in
Anthropology of Religions, and her interdisciplinary perspective has
allowed her to problematise anthropological and literary approaches to
orality/literacy, gender, ethnicity and narrativity in African literatures and
African migrant artistic productions. Her most recent books are Oralité et
nouvelles dimensions de l’Oralité (Paris: Publications Langues O’, INALCO
2008) edited together with Mena Lafkioui, De l’art de la narration Tamazight
(berbère). 200 ans d’études: état des lieux et perspectives (Paris – Louvain –
Dudley, MA: Peeters 2006), Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary
Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (Lanham, MD: Lexington 2005) edited
together with Sandra Ponzanesi, and Transcultural Modernities: Narrating
© 2009 The Author
Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 1–6, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00130.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
6 Daniela Merolla and Mineke Schipper
Africa in Europe, Matatu: Journal of African Culture and Society, Special Issue
(Amsterdam: Rodopi 2008, forthcoming), edited together with Elisabeth
Bekers and Sissy Helff. Daniela Merolla is Senior Lecturer in African
Literatures at the Department of Languages and Cultures of Africa, Leiden
University, The Netherlands.
Mineke Schipper’s research concentrates on intercultural comparison, at
the intersection of comparative literature, oral traditions and African studies.
She published in journals such as Présence Africaine; Theatre Research International; Comparative Literature; Research in African Literatures; New Literary
History. Among her many books are Beyond the Boundaries. African Literature
and Literary Theory (London/Chicago 1989); Imagining Insiders (London/New
York 1999); and Imagining Creation (with Mark Geller; Boston/Leiden
2008). Her comparative study Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet. Women
in Proverbs from Around the World (London and New Haven 2004, Eureka
Award 2005), argues that in cultures all over the globe proverbs reveal
intriguingly common patterns across centuries and continents. The book
has been translated into many languages (most recently Arabic). Her current
research is about the origin of the first people in myths worldwide. After
appointments at the Université Libre du Congo and Amsterdam Free
University, she presently teaches at the University of Leiden. She holds a
PhD from Amsterdam Free University.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Daniela Merolla, African Studies Department, Leiden University,
PO Box 9500, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands. E-mail: D.Merolla@let.leidenuniv.nl.
1
The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) funded this publication within
the framework of the project Creation Stories and Mythologies: New Questions and Comparative
Approaches. The project is part of the Internationalisation of Research Schools programme (in
cooperation with SOAS, London, UK). We thank Religion Compass for providing a forum for
the publicising of this research.
Works Cited
Bascom, WR, 1965. ‘The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives’, Journal of American Folklore, vol.
78, pp. 3–20.
Brelich, A, 1970. ‘Prolégomènes à une Histoire des Religions’, Histoire des Religions, Encyclopédie
de La Pléiade, Gallimard, Paris, pp. 3–59.
Cohen, PS, 1969. ‘Theories of Myth’, Man, vol. 4, no. 3, pp. 337–353.
Finnegan, R, 1970. Oral Literature in Africa, Clarendon House, Oxford, UK.
——, 1992. Oral Traditions and the Verbal Arts, Routledge, London and New York.
Okpewho, I, 1983. Myth in Africa: A Study of Its Aesthetic and Cultural Relevance, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Pinker, S, 1995. The Language Instinct: The New Science of Language and Mind, Penguin Books,
London.
© 2009 The Authors
Religion Compass 3/1 (2009): 1–6, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00130.x
Journal Compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd