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Introduction: The Role of Myth in Culture
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12526 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
1,426 Words |
| Author
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Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty is the Mircea Eliade Professor of
History of Religions at the University of Chicago. Her many
publications include Shiva: The Erotic Ascetic (Oxford, 1973);
Hindu Myths (Penguin, 1975); The Rig Veda (Penguin, 1981):
Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts: Dreams,
Illusion, and other Realities; and Tales of Sex and Violence
(all from the University of Chicago). |
The five essays in this collection, written without any mutual collaboration or consultation, bear witness to a surprisingly (well, perhaps not so surprisingly) coherent shared viewpoint. With the exception of Charles Long's introductory essay, treating a wide span of cultures rather than focusing on one culture in particular, all of these essays are about Indians--some about Indians in India, others about "Indians" in North- or Mezo-America. And with exception of Paul Courtright's essay, which plunges right into the material, all of them find it necessary to define myth before they begin. They do so by invoking the work of Mircea Eliade. There are, in addition, other links: several of the contributors (Charles Long, Brian Smith, Sam Gill) trace the word myth back to its origins (and Carrasco discusses the "prestige of origins" in all myths) among the Greeks; two (Long, Smith) invoke Ernst Cassirer and Claude Levi-Strauss; Carrasco cites Long; Smith and Carrasco cite me; and so forth.
Lest the reader suspect that he has stumbled into some sort of coven or shared mass hallucination of historians of religion, let me explain the ties that bind these essays to one another. When I was invited to guest-edit this section, I invited the scholars that I regarded as the leaders in the field, at the cutting edge of the study of myth in America. All but Paul Courtright have studied or taught at the University of Chicago, which is the axis mundi of mythology; methodological self-awareness is the unmistakable mark of Cain on the head of any Chicago-trained scholar. More to the point, it was there that all of us were powerfully influenced by Mircea Eliade, who almost single-handedly carved out the academic field in which all the contributors to this issue labor. It was Eliade who taught us to love the myths from India and from the Native Americans that we have until quite recently wrongly called Indians. It was he, too, who taught us to locate the study of myth, not only in the universal mind of homo religious, but in history, as, for example, in the particular historical situation that led Europeans to identify the people whom they colonized and exploited in the New World. It was he who rehabilitated the word "myth" from its Greek Fall and gave it new life. His is the hidden hand behind all of these essays. The themes that are repeated in the course of these essays, like the sacred themes that are repeated in a corpus of myths, are all variants on the central myth of the Chicago school.
Paul Courtright managed somehow to find his way into the navel of this field without actually working in Chicago; though over the years his New Haven purity has become a bit polluted by his intimate contact with many of us in the Chicago
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