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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
How to Do Things with Myths: A Performative Theory of Myths and How We Got There

How to Do Things with Myths: A Performative Theory of Myths and How We Got There

Strenski, Ivan

Paperback

Religion General Mythology & Folklore

ISBN10: 1800504772
ISBN13: 9781800504776
Publisher: Equinox Publishing
Published: Dec 31 2024
Pages: 240
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.55 Width: 6.14 Depth: 9.21
Language: English
How to Do Things with Myths assembles a radically updated collection of the author's oft-cited publications on myth. Together, they tell how theories of myth have changed and led to a novel performative theory of myth. Beginning from its mid-19th-century foundations with philologist, Friedrich Max Muller, myths had been conceived in textual terms as quasi-biblical, static narratives. Not until the impact of ethnographic studies of traditional societies in the early 20th century did myths come to be regarded in situ as living agents shaping their societies. Leading a movement against Muller's static, textual view of myths were his French sociological critics, notably Emile Durkheim and his equipe. The Durkheimians felt that myths mattered because of what they did by functioning within human societies. Adopting the Durkheimian notion of function was Bronislaw Malinowski. But as a pragmatist and positivist, Malinowski narrowed his conception of myths to utilitarian terms. In place of Malinowski's utilitarianism, the author proposes a performative theory of myths - a theory freeing myths for a wider range of agency in culture, unrestricted by Malinowski's behaviorism and positivism. Conceived as important stories, myths can thus do things in many, often subtle and unquantifiable, ways, depending upon a given culture's own value system. Conceptually and theoretically, a performative theory situates itself with respect to the efforts of some of the most popular contemporary myth theorists -- Bruce Lincoln, Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss, Georges Dumezil, Robert A. Segal and Jonathan Z. Smith.

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