How to Do Things with Myths

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 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.