How to Do Things with Myths
A Performative Theory of Myths and How We Got There
Ivan Strenski [+–]
University of California Riverside (retired)
Author of 15 books and more than 100 academic articles on religion and political issues
like gift, sacrifice, freedom of religion/religious freedom, religious nationalism, French
Catholic integralism, post-revolutionary French Jewry, divine right of kings, Ivan Strenski
is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California,
Riverside. His most recent books are Muslims, Islams, and Occidental Anxieties:
Conversations about Islamophobia (2022), a history of the study of religion from the
Renaissance to the present-day, Understanding Theories of Religion (2014) and Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power and Politics (2009), Arabic translation (2016).
like gift, sacrifice, freedom of religion/religious freedom, religious nationalism, French
Catholic integralism, post-revolutionary French Jewry, divine right of kings, Ivan Strenski
is Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at the University of California,
Riverside. His most recent books are Muslims, Islams, and Occidental Anxieties:
Conversations about Islamophobia (2022), a history of the study of religion from the
Renaissance to the present-day, Understanding Theories of Religion (2014) and Why Politics Can’t Be Freed from Religion: Radical Interrogations of Religion, Power and Politics (2009), Arabic translation (2016).
How to Do Things with Myths: A Performative Theory of Myths and How We Got There 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 Müller, 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 Müller’s static, textual view of myths were his French sociological critics, notably Émile Durkheim and his équipe. 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 Lévi-Strauss, Georges Dumézil, Robert A. Segal and Jonathan Z. Smith.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
What is a “performative” concept and theory of myth, and why should it be recommended? As philosophers speak of speech ‘acts,” myths often “act” — they “do” things in culture, rather than being static narratives of events. Myths “perform” prominently these days in contemporary politics. There, myths compete with historical accounts to justify the legitimacy of political regimes, territorial claims, rights to rule and so on. Myths, then, often play major roles in political cultures that, in turn, shape policy.
Chapter 2
An exposition of Friedrich Max Müller’s theory of myths, here a paradigm of a static, textual, intellectualist – non-performative — theory of myths. Müller interpreted myths from Vedic India, as conveying profound philosophical ideas. Even though today’s students of myth no longer respect Müller’s theory, his flair for cross-cultural comparison, his desire to be free of confessional biases, and his intellectual rigor, all exemplify traits of successful theorizing about myths.
Chapter 3
Durkheim’s sociological approach started a critique of Müller’s hegemony of myths, partly by exposing its Protestant theological biases. Notably, Müller’s mythophilia was well-received by the Liberal Protestant anti-ritualist leadership of the French “sciences religieuses,” like Albert Réville. Durkheim and some Jewish scholars battled Réville by arguing for ritual over against myth. Ritual was an elemental social reality; it ‘peopled’ religion. It made religion come alive. Along with Jewish scholars like Sylvain Lévi, the Durkheimians viewed ritual as more than dramatizing of myth but, in effect, as liturgical agents making the gods real to believers.
Chapter 4
The Durkheimian theory of myth is primarily the work of Henri Hubert, one of Durkheim’s closest collaborators. This chapter 4 also serves as a biographical essay on Hubert, featuring make his performative forays into myth. Hubert diligently contributed numerous short articles for the Année sociologique on myth. He also trained scholars who produced important studies of myth, such as Stefan Czarnowski’s 1919 study of the myths and cults about Saint Patrick. There, Czarnowski used St Patrick to inspire his own Poland’s struggles for independence.
Chapter 5
Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism dominated the theory of myth in mid-20 th -century. His attempts to establish a Durkheimian provenance for structuralism has misled myth theorists about Durkheimian theory of myth. There, we find a halting theory of myths at once sociological, but also one granting myths a degree of autonomy of its social bases, but in any case, hardly structuralist. The true heirs of Hubert’s work on myth are Georges Dumézil, Maurice Leenhardt, and Marcel Granet. By contrast, the structural theory of myth boasts an exceptional originality.
Chapter 6
Based on intense fieldwork in New Guinea, Malinowski theorizes that myths ‘perform’ – they act as tools for sustaining the social order; they do not ‘explain’ anything. His resort to a subjective method of concept-formation breaks with heretofore prevailing passive empiricist approaches to ‘discovering’ the definition of myth. Attention is given to Malinowski’s major intellectual influences — Darwin, Wilhelm Dilthey, Durkheim, J. G. Frazer, Freud, Ernst Mach, Nietzsche, Mauss, Radcliffe-Brown, Wilhelm Wundt.
Chapter 7
Arriving at a definition of myth is a creative, constructive effort, not a passive act of discovery. Following Richard Rorty’s “pragmatist” approach to conceptualization, the success of such a definition depends on how well it fits the use to which we seek to out the concept. Beginning with a grasp of the ordinary, everyday meaning of myth as ‘story,’ what kind of story merits being called a “myth”?
Chapter 8
Major scholars of myth, Segal and Smith, continue Müller’s essentially textualist and literary conception of myths. This leads to Segal and Smith stumbling into a series of conceptual problems. Segal finds difficulty both resisting defining ‘myth,” but then also needing to use in the sense of “significant” and “weighty” stories. Likewise resisting recommendations of any theory of myth, Segal concludes in fact preferring psychoanalytic theories of myth, derived mostly from Freud and Jung. Smith began as a student of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a magnum opus in textual conceptions of myth. While Smith soon abandoned Frazer, his orientation toward Lévi-Strauss often reveals an ongoing Trickster’s attachment to incongruous literary memes like “incongruity.”
Chapter 9
French Aryanist racists in Durkheim’s Third Republic sought a scientific defense of their anti-Semitism in the myth of the Aryan origins of Europeans. Hubert saw through their thinly disguised anti-Semitic ideological efforts, presented as the pseudo-science of “Anthroposociology.” In the heat of 20th -century French politics, he published a series historically-informed articles discrediting the Aryanist theories of racial superiority, by undermining their mythical bases.
Chapter 10
Since the mid-19 th century, Russian nationalism rests, in part, on what the presumably ancient myth of Moscow, Third Rome “does” to insure the legitimacy of Russia’s claims to leadership of Christendom. The myth implies that Muscovy assumes a political pre-eminence for all time from Constantinople after its fall to the Ottomans in 1453. Historical data, however, defeat all the main arguments in this mythological origin-story of modern Russia.
