Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture

Ever since the rise of science and the scientific method in the seventeenth century, we have rejected mythology as the product of superstitious and primitive minds. Only now are we coming to a fuller appreciation of the nature and role of myth in human history. In these five lectures originally prepared for Canadian radio, Claude Lévi-Strauss offers, in brief summations, the insights of a lifetime spent interpreting myths and trying to discover their significance for human understanding.
 
The lectures begin with a discussion of the historical split between mythology and science and the evidence that mythic levels of understanding are being reintegrated in our approach to knowledge. In an extension of this theme, Professor Lévi-Strauss analyzes what we have called “primitive thinking” and discusses some universal features of human mythology. The final two lectures outline the functional relationship between mythology and history and the structural relationship between mythology and music.

• The Savage Mind (The Nature of Human Society Series)
• Structural Anthropology
• Mythologies: The Complete Edition, in a New Translation
• The Sacred and The Profane: The Nature of Religion
• The Interpretation Of Cultures (Basic Books Classics)
• The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures)
• Tristes Tropiques (Penguin Classics)
• Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis
• The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies
• A History of Anthropology (Anthropology, Culture and Society)