Myth and Culture

The story of Kangobai and the levels of intelligibility of his idiosyncratic sign language provide a helpful analogy for understanding the ways in which myth might become infinitely variable in its forms. ¹ But it falls far short of explaining how culture itself emerges from the raw material of human experience, let alone how the evocative vector we have been tracing may influence that emergence. In fact, simply agreeing on what constitutes "culture" has become something of an impossible quest given that the word itself has been appropriated by a number of disciplines and subdisciplines that use the words slightly, or completely differently. ² But Kangobai’s story, and similar work done in cognitive anthropology, does offer us a direction in which to pursue the question of how myth and culture are related, and what role emotion plays in that relationship.