An Analysis of Homan’s And Strauss’s Methods of Deriving the Meaning of Primitive Religion

Bronislaw Malinowski and Arthur Reginald Radcliffe-Brown are, in some circles, considered the creators of modern anthropology particularly both had assisted in developing a theory and method that was established by the anthropologists of the midcentury as the “science of society”. However, major changes in the 1960s saw the reconceptualization of economics and politics as well as the emergence of new concepts that transformed anthropology. One particular academic who ushered the new age of thinking was Claude Levi-Strauss who revolutionized the discipline by bringing an epistemological break with earlier methods of study. This paper will compare two texts: George C. Homan’s “Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown” and “The Structural Study of Myth by Claude Levi-Strauss”.

It will analyze how the texts deal with a similar challenge but employ different approaches of dealing with the problem.

The first text is an attempt by Homans to theoretically dispel the conflict between Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown over the relationship between magic rituals and anxiety in different communities. Malinowski was a functionalist who believed that all cultural traits served the needs of persons in a society whereas Radcliffe-Brown, also a functionalist, believed that the different aspects of social behavior do not satisfy personal needs but maintain a society’s social structure. Malinowski held that magic rituals are the result of anxiety caused by gaps in man’s knowledge and inability to control nature to meet his needs. He contended that primitive people performed magic rituals when they were overcome with worry to insure good luck and lull their fears. On the other hand, Radcliffe-Brown theorized that magic rituals do not give men comfort or a sense of security but instead give them anxieties and fears that they would otherwise be free.

He proclaimed that magic rituals are a form of socialization and maintaining the social structure of a society. Homans tries to synthesize the two outlooks, in the matter of magic rituals, into one model: “Malinowski is looking at the individual, Radcliffe-Brown at society. Malinowski is saying that the individual tends to feel anxiety on certain occasions; Radcliffe-Brown is saying that society expects the individual to feel anxiety on certain occasions. But there is every reason to believe that both statements are true. They are not mutually exclusive.” (Homans, 1941, p. 168).

Homans merges the theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown to come up with seven elements. He begins by reiterating Malinowski’s assertion that man experiences primary anxiety when he wants the success of certain outcomes but realizes that his abilities cannot guarantee the desired results. As a result, he performs the rituals dictated by his community even though there are no practical results except the confidence he gets after properly performing them. The man feels displaced or secondary anxiety when any one of the community’s traditions is not observed. As a result of this secondary anxiety, there is the need for a secondary ritual of expiation and purification to dispel the unease. He further asserts that the magic rituals are founded on rationalizations consisting of either simple or very elaborate statements. Homans then supports Radcliffe-Brown theories by holding that the form of magic ritual is not hinged on the nature of a practical result to be attained but alludes to the fundamental myths of the community. He agrees that magic rituals function to maintain the social structure by binding the community into a mutually understanding unit. He affirms that ritual actions do not produce a practical result and are therefore “not related to the world external to the society but to the internal constitution of the society. It gives the members of the society confidence; it dispels their anxieties; it disciplines the social organization” (Homans, 1941, p. 172).

In the second text, Levi-Strauss lays out his structural method of solving difficulties of anthropological theory, particularly myths. Unlike Homan’s model which employed sociological and psychological structures to derive the meaning of primitive religion, Strauss epistemologically broke from such methods of analysis and employed an approach that developed the discipline into a scientific project. Strauss’s structural analyses and techniques comprise of a unique set of theoretical concepts on social and cultural aspects of human life and are not founded on the tautological and trivial assumptions Homan’s model is rested on but deals with the actual nature of human facts. Strauss believed that particular universal human truths exist at the structural level and he therefore employed the structural analysis method as an objective and scientific method of interpreting myths. He borrowed the ideas of Saussure which are rudimentary to any structural analysis: Saussure applied structural analysis to language but Strauss applied it as an anthropologist to myth. Strauss broadened Saussure’s ideas about the basic structures of language to include any organizational system that forms meaning out of cultural signs. The anthropologist argued that any part of a culture founds a signifying system provided that the system comprises of signs that can be interpreted along the lines laid out by Saussure. These lines involved determining signification by studying how signifiers connect to signified and determining value by studying how a sign varied from other symbols in the system. Strauss adapts Saussure’s linguistic framework and asserts that the physiological states of mythmaking exist at a worldwide human level, like those for language use.

Strauss uses the structural analysis method to examine the inherent incongruity in the nature of myths: they appear to function without rationality or continuity but they are remarkable similar in both content and structure. He captures this challenge in the statement: “It is precisely this awareness of a basic antimony pertaining to the nature of myth that may lead us towards its solution. For the contradiction which we face is very similar to that which in earlier times brought considerable worry to the first philosophers concerned with linguistic problems; linguistics could only begin to evolve as a science after this contradiction had been overcome” (Strauss, 1963, p. 208). The anthropologist theorizes that the meaning of myths, like in semantics, is to be discovered in the combinations and permutations of what Strauss calls constituent units and not in individual units themselves. Unlike Homan’s model which links the general theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown and so focuses on individuals and society, Strauss’s method centers on two Sausserean notions: langue and parole. The first denotes the structural element of language (the revertible in the structural system) while the second denotes the particular usages of language (the non-revertible in the structural system). Strauss posits that while myth is language since it employs these features, it is unlike language because it merges the two to employ a third aspect, which is describing an unending pattern. Consequently, myths achieve form and content in a way superior to language. Translation does not inflict as much epistemic violence on myths as it does on poetry because meaning is not just encoded in the content but in the structure itself.

Strauss begins describing his structural method of analyzing myths by defining the analogous fundamental elements in myths as gross constituent units because they use linguistic components and go beyond them to form an extra layer of meaning. He first recognizes these units by splitting the myths into short sentences and writing them down on index cards before arranging the cards in a sequential manner. Understanding the meaning of the myths is dependent on the organization of the connections on the index cards. Strauss theory is that “the true constituent units of a myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce a meaning” (Strauss, 1963, p. 211). The representation of these bundles results in both synchronic and diachronic axes of construing mythological time. Strauss represents the parole aspect in the synchronic axis (an historical) and the langue on the diachronic axis (historical). The duality of time and meaning allows him to draw significance from patterns that demonstrate affinity and which may be considered as a universal pattern, rather than understanding them diachronically. Strauss demonstrates his structural analysis method by applying it to the Oedipus myth. He begins by first arranging the constituent units both diachronically and synchronically: putting together relations in columns and writing the myth in rows from left to right. Strauss puts the common element of overrating of blood relations in the first column and the underrating of blood relations in the second. The slaying of monsters together with the rejection of the autochthonous beginning of man are put in the third whereas those with difficulties in walking and acting straight and symbolically to the intractability of the autochthonous beginnings of man are put in the fourth.

Strauss shows how the last unit replicates the first in a recurrent manner whereby the slaying of the killing of the chthonian dragon as well as the sphinx results in the autochthonous beginning of man. The slaying may be viewed, in this sense, as a refusal of the autochthonous beginning of man. In order to derive cosmogenic and chthonic meanings, Strauss compares different myths. He likens the chthonic features of the Cosmo genic lore of Pueblo to the Oedipus myth. The anthropologist observes that Masauwu, who starts the emergence and the chthonian Shumaikole is crippled like Oedipus in the foot. He, therefore, makes the connection between autochthonous beginnings and the incapacity to walk properly. Strauss understands the Oedipus myth as one dealing with the incapacity of mankind to unite the belief of autochthonous beginnings with the actual knowledge of having been formed from the union of man and woman. Although there are numerous myths relating to Oedipus that have been omitted, Strauss believes that his interpretation relies not on the content but on the structure and so extra elements may be included in the bundles without altering interpretation. In the text, he analyzes several other myths where like the Oedipus mythos, there are contradicting features, thereby leading him to reason that the logic of myth is based on a “double, reciprocal exchange of functions” (Strauss, 1963, p. 227).

Strauss’s method of analysis brings structural order out of chaos and provides a means of accounting for widespread dissimilarities in myths by enabling anthropologists to recognize the basic logical processes on which mythical thought is founded. Although Homan’s model addresses magical rituals more sufficiently that either Malinowski’s or Radcliffe-Brown’s theory, it is flawed because it is founded on two functionalist theories that are tautological. All functionalist arguments wrongly assume that because a social institution is thought to perform a critical function, the function is the reason for the institution and that the former would not be achieved if the latter ceased to exist. Although Strauss’s approach to religion has its shortcomings, it is logical and scientific in all its aspects and does not rely on any subjective interpretative factors like Homan’s model.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Homans, G. C. (1941). Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. American Anthropologist, 164-172.

Levi-Strauss, C. (1963). Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books Inc.