ABSTRACT
Of all the members of the Gernet School, Marcel Detienne has been the one most involved in distinguishing the structural analysis of the contextualists from the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. Presently the Director of Studies and Chair of the History of Greek Religions at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Detienne has used his philological training to bring together history and structural analysis. His method has evolved from a close application of the cognitive categories of structuralism to an application to written myths of the Asdiwal “ethnographic context” by Lévi-Strauss. As he puts it in his Dionysus Slain:
To discover the complete horizon of a society’s symbolic values, it is also necessary to map out its transgressions, interrogate its deviants, discern phenomena of rejection and refusal, and circumscribe the silent myths that unlock upon underlying knowledge and the implicit. 1
