cism than on anthropology. Here, however, the formal struc-
tures discussed in the work of Lévi-Strauss and Greimas have
been transformed into the Nietzschean exaggerations of
Jacques Derrida’s theories of poststructuralist deconstruc-
tion. Elaborations of this sort cannot be brought within the
scope of the present article, though I shall make some refer-
ence to the way these writers discuss texts as objects to be in-
terpreted and recreated by the reader rather than as channels
through which an author communicates to potential readers.
Structuralist analyses of a quite conventional sort have
been used with success in a number of other more immedi-
ately relevant fields. Marcel Detienne and his close colleagues
have applied Lévi-Strauss’s methodology to materials from
ancient Greece (see Gordon, 1981); Wendy Doniger
O’Flaherty (1973) has used an undiluted version of the theo-
ry to analyze a vast range of classical Indian texts; and Claude
Chabrol and Louis Marin (1974), among others, have ex-
plored the applicability of the method to the analysis of bibli-
cal texts.
Continuity versus discontinuity. It is time to show
why an essay on structuralism, primarily of the Lévi-
Straussian sort, should have a place in an encyclopedia of reli-
gion. First, however, attention should be drawn to a modifi-
cation of the more orthodox binary-opposition versions of
structuralist theory which is particularly relevant in applica-
tions of this type of theory to religious materials.
Lévi-Strauss writes of reality being a model in the mind
made up of a network of relations between discontinuous
mental entities linked in binary pairs. But the reality which
is out there in the world and which we perceive through our
senses is certainly not of this kind. It is continuous in both
time and space. It is not naturally made up of separate things
and separate events; the appearance of discontinuity is im-
posed on our experience by the way we perceive it and, more
particularly, by the way we use words to describe it. We feel
that there is a disjunction between day and night because we
have these two words, day/night, linked in binary opposition;
in our ordinary experience, however, daytime just fades into
nighttime and vice versa.
Structuralist theorists have handled this incompatibility
between the continuities of experience and the discontinu-
ities of conceptual thinking in a variety of ways, but several
anglophone writers, including Mary Douglas (1966), Victor
Turner (1969), and myself (1976) have emphasized the rele-
vance of the arguments of Arnold van Gennep (1909).
Van Gennep originally applied his arguments to rituals
marking a change of social status. In the world of experience
out there, time is continuous. When a husband dies, there
is no chronological discontinuity between the moment when
his wife is his wife and the subsequent moment when she has
become his widow. But in social time things are quite differ-
ent: society imposes an intermediate stage of mourning when
the wife/widow is removed from ordinary social relations and
is subject to various kinds of restrictions. During this inter-
mediate phase she is subject to taboo and is treated as a sacred
person.
Van Gennep’s insight can be generalized in a variety of
ways. First, it is empirically the case that social transitions
nearly always have a triadic structure which van Gennep
himself described as (1) the rite of separation, (2) the margin-
al state (rite de marge), and (3) the rite of aggregation. Sec-
ond, it is also an empirical fact that not only is the marginal
state regularly marked by taboo, but that all forms of holi-
ness, whether applied to particular persons or particular
places or particular times, can be shown on analysis to be
marginal; they represent an interface between two nonholy
categories which we are thereby able to perceive as separated
from each other. The argument is that, at the level of the
model in the mind, the impression of disjuncture is achieved
either by suppressing all consciousness of the ambiguities
that lie at the margin or by treating the margin as belonging
to a different order of reality: sacred-extraordinary-
supernatural versus profane-ordinary-natural.
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE STUDY OF MYTH AND RITUAL. To
judge by the titles of their books, structuralist authors are
quite centrally concerned with the analysis of myth, but they
rarely explain what they mean by this elusive concept, and
the definitions that have been offered are seldom mutually
compatible. I must therefore offer my own.
To live comfortably in society, every individual must
have access to a cosmology—an ordered set of topological,
physical, and metaphysical ideas which make sense of imme-
diate experience. The cosmology is not naturally known; it
is given to us by the conventional assumptions of the cultural
system in which we live; it is taught to us as part of the com-
plex process by which we are transformed from animals into
socialized human beings. Furthermore, as an adjunct to
learning what the cosmos is like, we also learn how to behave
in particular contexts of time and place and interpersonal re-
lationship. These rules of behavior likewise derive from the
process of individual socialization.
Both the cosmology and the rules of behavior have to
be justified. They are justified by stories about the past which
explain how things came to be as they are, and by stories of
a rather similar kind which provide precedents for culturally
approved behavior or, alternatively, precedents for the sup-
posedly dire consequences of ignoring local cultural con-
ventions. The entire corpus of such validating stories is myth.
Universal versus local applicability. Viewed in this
way, myth has moral value. It is sacred for those who accept
the validity of the cosmology and the associated customary
rules, but in itself it is of strictly local validity. Anthropolo-
gists like me who accept the empirical evidence that there are
no cultural universals which are not entirely trivial are likely
to reject the view of Lévi-Strauss, Freud, and many others
who argue that there is a universal human mythology associ-
ated with universal, unconscious motivations shared by all
individual human beings.8752 STRUCTURALISM [FIRST EDITION]