Some Recent Work on Lévi-Strauss and Myth

I’ve long thought that the work Lévi-Strauss did on myth in Mythologies needed to be taken further, and have said so in my working paper, Beyond Lévi-Strauss on Myth: Objectification, Computation, and Cognition (2015). It seems that others have been thinking the same thing. Here are some abstracts. 

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Mauro W. Barbosa de Almeida, Bernard Arcand, Paul Jorion, Claude Assaba, Michael G. Kenny, Sheldon Klein, David B. Kronenfeld, Jesse W. Nash, Jacob Palis, Jr. and Stephen David Siemens, Symmetry and Entropy: Mathematical Metaphors in the Work of Levi-Strauss [and Comments and Reply], Current Anthropology, Vol. 31, No. 4 (Aug. - Oct., 1990), pp. 367-385, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2743257.

Levi-Strauss' structuralism is here considered as part of an intellectual trend that gained currency during the first half of this century-a trend towards greater concern in the mathematical physical and biological sciences for invariance and structure that is characterized by the importance of the concept of the transformation group. Levi-Straus has introduced the essence of this trend, more at a stylistic level than by means of definite demonstrations into the human sciences. Basic mathematical structures, the principal one being that of the algebraic structure of the transformation group, underlie all the models he has examined. It can be argued that his anthropology leads to the conclusion that the human mind operates in different cultures according to these basic structures-that they are universals. But Levi-Straus is also concerned with processes of change, decay, and evolution in structures. The effort to combine the structural approach with an interest in disorder and change is a neglected but essential aspect of his theory. 

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Marc Thuillard, Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, A phylogenetic interpretation of the canonical formula of myths by Levi-Strauss, CAES Vol. 3, No 2 (June 2017), https://culturalanthropologyandethnosemiotics.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/thuillard_le_quellec_canonical_formula.pdf.

Lévi-Strauss’ canonical formula and Mosko’s narrative formula have a simple interpretation within the theoretical framework of phylogenetics. The canonical formula represents a complex but by far not unique way of combining 2 and 3-states characters in a phylogenetic tree description of myths. The canonical formula describes an instance of myth’s evolution that can be described exactly by a perfect phylogenetic tree. Mosko’s formula describes a completely different scheme of evolution. Mosko’s formula is typically the result of a fast evolution of mythemes resulting possibly in all combinations of binary characters. The evolution of myths corresponds quite often to intermediary situations. This observation may explain why the canonical formula has been identified only in a limited number of instances. 

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Jean-Francois Santucci, Albert Doja, and Laurent Capocchi, A Discrete-Event Simulation of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Analysis of Myths Based on Symmetry and Double Twist Transformations, Symmetry 2020, 12(10), 1706; https://doi.org/10.3390/sym12101706.

This paper presents a modeling and simulation approach in order to perform a generative analysis of folktales aimed at validating Claude Lévi-Strauss’ theory and method. To this aim, a discrete-event simulation is proposed. The simulation is based on the development of a set of discrete-event models dedicated to generating a set of folktales from an initial one, according to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ structural analysis based on symmetry and double twist transformations. This paper describes in detail how these discrete-event models have been implemented in the framework of the DEVSimPy software environment by using myths of Native American mythology and folktales of Corsican oral literature. The validation involved the following steps: (i) definition of a reference folktale (according to Claude Lévi-Strauss’ methodology) (ii) generation of a set of folktales by performing their own transformations (iii) generation of a graph allowing to analyze the links that have been created after performing a set of folktales transformations. Finally, the computational validation of Lévi-Strauss’s method is intended to ground a new research that may reformulate structural analysis and elaborate a neo-structural model of canonical formalization based on transformational morphodynamics. The aim is to conceptualize and measure recursively the structural dynamics and the recurrent patterns of current identity transformations in liberal democracies, especially in US and EU contexts where ethnic/racial divisions and migration challenges are becoming more acute than ever. 

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This last article is somewhat different from the others. It is the introductory essay from a collection of essays presented at The English Institute. The English Institute, as you may know, is a small conference where a small group of scholars are invited (I believe) to address a specific topic. The topic for 2017 was scale and the organizers used a classic essay by Lévi-Strauss as a conceptual focus. The article has no abstract – some humanistic journals don’t publish abstracts – so I present paragraph from the introductory essay.

Sandra Macpherson, Meredith Martin, Essays from The English Institute 2017: Scale, ELH, Volume 86, Number 2, Summer 2019, pp. 267-274, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/726180.

The text for the conversation at Irvine was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “The Structural Analysis of Myth” (1955), a piece whose startling relevance to a number of the talks was all the more surprising given how little attention structuralism has received in recent scale talk. Walkowitz argues that for modernist studies “the turn to scale began geographically at least 15 years ago, with the new theories of world literature,” and that if “global modernism” is “part of a first re-scaling in modernist studies,” the second, happening in the forum she introduces, turns its attention instead to “middle scales” and to “the mechanisms that get us from one scale to another.”1 According to Underwood and English, however, moving up and down in scale—and meta-critical attentiveness to this movement—has been a central feature of the history of criticism writ large. They observe that “scalar constructs” both large (“temporal spans” and “geo-cultural categories”) and small (“formal entities”) “organize our research projects and structure our intellectual and institutional divisions of labor.”2 And the disciplinary history they chart moves back and forth from the relatively large-scale project of philology to the “scalar contraction” of New Criticism to the scaling up of “Always Historicize!” to the “gigahistoricisms” of distant reading, deep time, and the world literary system, back down to “close but not deep” and “too-close” reading.