ABSTRACT
Lévi-Strauss painstakingly analysed the structure and narrative content of hundreds of mythic tales he collected from around the globe. From the tribal stories of the Amazonian rainforest to the ancient myths of Greece, he sought to uncover the invisible rule book of storytelling in order to diagnose the essential nature of human experience, believing that any common themes or motifs located in those myths would reveal essential truths about the way the human mind structures the world. All stories, Lévi-Strauss ultimately concluded, work through oppositional arrangements – through the construction of characters or narrative incidents that clash or jar. Moreover, stories and storytelling, in Lévi-Strauss’s view, perform a vital social function: oppositional presentations are resolved to outline societal taboos and socially acceptable behaviours.
