The Structure of Myth

According to the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, myths are the products of the resourceful ingenuity (in French, bricolage) ¹ of indigenous peoples selecting narrative materials from their environments. The nature of this resourceful ingenuity has intrigued a group of French intellectuals during the past thirty years. This group is called “structuralist” because its members attribute the survival, the origin, and the function of myths to common crosscultural factors they identify as “structures.” These structures are bundles of information not obvious either to the narrator or to the listener. The bundles are collected features that reveal either the reasons for the survival of myths, or their origins, or their functions within their contexts. The structuralists consider themselves to have talents as the collectors from myths of these bundles of information. The structuralists do not always agree about the application of the word “structuralist” to myth. However, they can be generally classified according to whether they bundle myths by 1) the survival of myth, 2) the origin of myth, or 3) its function within a specified context.