What Lévi-Strauss May or May Not Owe to Henri Hubert
How to Do Things with Myths - A Performative Theory of Myths and How We Got There - Ivan Strenski
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).
Description
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.