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- Myth - a story describing the origins of the world, some natural phenomenon, or some aspect of culture, which contains at least one physically or humanly impossible event or situation. Myths are often acted out in ritual and encapsulate a culture's cosmology and cosmogony and provide justification for culturally prescribed behaviour.
- Keesing: "myths are accounts about how the world came to be the way it is, about a super-ordinary realm of events before or behind the experienced natural world; they are accounts that are believed to be true and in some sense sacred."
- Malinowski (1925): His sociological interpretation of Trobriand myths; he said they made sense not by themselves for psychoanalysis, but only as living social events in context of real political relations. They were needed; they served a social function (in the functionalist view).
E.g. Trobriand origin myths explains and validates brother/sister taboo; local emergence leading to local sub-clans; others legitimise food taboos, rank and precedence. (i.e. mythological charter validating present social relations).
- Levi-Strauss (1969-1974): disagrees; he says realm of myth helps people transpose symbolically the contradictions of existence which worry them; like death, the origin of the first man, and the first mate etc.
- Edmund Leach (1974): Problem of avoiding incest if man and woman were created equal (see Chagnon Pg104)
- Ardener (1972): symbolic associations between women and the world of nature.
- Ortner (1974): women marginal: both cultural and natural beings; symbolically associated with the moon, blood, darkness, nature etc.
- Needham (1978): Myths- timeless stories that describe the origin of something- the world, a natural phenomenon or some aspect of culture and "confronts us with at least one event or situation which is physically or humanly impossible" (e.g. the immaculate conception).
Some rituals are the dramatic re-enactments of myths.
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