In structuralism-influenced studies of

mythology Myth is a folklore genre consisting of Narrative, narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or Origin myth, origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not Objectivity (philosophy), ...

, a mytheme is a fundamental generic unit of narrative structure (typically involving a relationship between a character, an event, and a theme) from which myths are thought to be constructed—a minimal unit that is always found shared with other, related mythemes and reassembled in various ways ("bundled") or linked in more complicated relationships. For example, the myths of Greek

Adonis In Greek mythology, Adonis, ; derived from the Canaanite word ''ʼadōn'', meaning "lord".R. S. P. Beekes, ''Etymological Dictionary of Greek'', Brill, 2009, p. 23. was the mortal lover of the goddess Aphrodite. One day, Adonis was gored by a ...

and Egyptian

Osiris Osiris (, from Egyptian ''wsjr'', cop, ⲟⲩⲥⲓⲣⲉ , ; Phoenician: 𐤀𐤎𐤓, romanized: ʾsr) is the god of fertility, agriculture, the afterlife, the dead, resurrection, life, and vegetation in ancient Egyptian religion. He ...

share several elements, leading some scholars to conclude that they share a source, i.e. images passed down in cultures or from one to another, being ascribed new interpretations of the action depicted, as well as new names in various readings of

icon An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most c ...

Overview

Claude Lévi-Strauss Claude Lévi-Strauss (, ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair of Social Anthro ...

(1908–2009), who gave the term wide circulation, wrote, "If one wants to establish a parallel between

structural linguistics Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within t ...

and the structural analysis of myths, the correspondence is established, not between mytheme and word but between mytheme and

phoneme In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language. For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-wes ...

." Lévi-Strauss, ''La poetière jalouse'', Paris, 1985 (''The Jealous Potter'', Chicago, 1988) pp. 144-46. The structuralist analyzer of folk tales

Vladimir Propp Vladimir Yakovlevich Propp (russian: Владимир Яковлевич Пропп; – 22 August 1970) was a Soviet folklorist and scholar who analysed the basic structural elements of Russian folk tales to identify their simplest irredu ...

treated the individual tale as the unit of analysis. The unitary mytheme, by contrast, is the equivalent in myth of the

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology. In English, morphemes are often but not necessarily words. Morphemes that stand alone ar ...

s, and sememes into which

divides language, the smallest possible units of sound, structure, and meaning (respectively) within a language system. In the 1950s, Claude Lévi-Strauss first adapted this technique of language analysis to analytic myth criticism. In his work on the myth systems of primitive tribes, working from the analogy of language structure, he adopted the French term ''mythème'', with the assertion that the system of meaning within mythic utterances parallels closely that of a language system. Roman Jakobson varies this idea, treating mythemes as

concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by s ...

s or phonemes which have no significance in themselves but whose significance might be shown by sociological analysis. Philosophers such as

Daniel Dennett Daniel Clement Dennett III (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields rel ...

have also used the term "mytheme". Lev Manovich uses the terms ''seme'' and ''mytheme'' in his book ''The Language of New Media'' to describe aspects of culture that computer images enter into dialog with.

Notes

References

* {{cite book , first = Claude , last = Lévi-Strauss , authorlink = Claude Lévi-Strauss , chapter = La Structure des mythes , title = Anthropologie Structurale , url = https://archive.org/details/anthropologiestr00levi , location = Paris , publisher = Plon , language = French , year = 1958 , pages
227–255
, oclc = 753269 Comparative mythology *

Overview

See also

Notes

References