Müller’s Legacy, Broken: Malinowski and the Pragmatist Theory of Myths
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
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.