Revision:Myth in Gopalpur SocietyTSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > Anthropology > Myth in Gopalpur Society
- The origin stories that document the first ancestors - usually a brother and sister- who founded the hamlet and garden lands that each matrilineage claims are not perceived as myths of primordial or legendary times. In the minds of the Trobrianders, the stories recount the actions of real people who made decisions that continue to affect the affairs of each successive generation. Among all the ancestors who established matrilineages, only some of them came to Kiriwina with extensive food taboos and certain shell body decorations; these, from the beginning, ranked them as chiefly lineages and separated them from the commoner matrilineages, whose ancestors came without elaborate sumptuary rules. Whether expressed as taboos or prescriptions, these sumptuary rules sharply isolate the chief and define him and other members of his matrilineage as different kinds of social persons.
- Each founding brother and sister did not arrive alone. Other sibling sets identified with other matrilineages in the same and other clans often came from the same place together. The lineage ancestors who came together continued to be allies, and today these same alliances continue. In the case of chiefly lineages, however, those who came with them as commoners worked for them by raising their pigs and growing betel nuts and coconut palm trees. From time to time, the chiefs rewarded them with stone axe-blades or shell valuables.
- The ancestress and her brother emerged from the underworld from "a hole". In that underworld, in the days before life on earth, people lived as they do now. The ancestral brother and sister brought up with them scared objects and knowledge, skills and crafts, and the magic that distinguish this group from others. According to Malinowski, this myth can only be understood in the rich context of Trobriand life and cultural meaning. Brother and sister emerged because they represent the 2 essential elements of a subclan; a husband did not emerge because he is, in terms of the subclan, an irrelevant outsider. The ancestral pair lived in separate houses because the relationship of brother and sister is marked by sharp taboos. This myth validates the rights of the subclan to the territory and encapsulates the magic and skills that make them sociologically and ritually unique.
- Other origin myths known by all Trobrianders relate the emergence of the four clans, legitimising their food taboos, but, more particularly. Matters of rank and precedence. Finally, other local myths deals with the relative rank, position, and dispersion of high-ranking sub-clans beyond the point of original emergence. Such myths, Malinowski says, validate the political structure and provide a mythological charter to justify and reinforce present social relations. Pulling Trobriand myths out of this social context, we would not understand them.
- Levi-Strauss disagrees with the above paragraph. Levi-Strauss is seeking to explicate the universal workings of the human mind by looking at varied cultural forms as artefacts. The realm of myth is crucial in this enterprise because here human thought has its widest freedom. Levi-Strauss argues that peoples everywhere are plagued intellectually by the contradictions of existence- by death; by man's dual character, as part of nature yet transformed by culture; by dichotomies of spirit and body; by the contradictions of descent from a first man (where did a non-incestuous first mate come from?); and so on. The realm of myth is used above all to tinker endlessly with these contradictions, by transposing them symbolically.
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