How to Do Things with Myths

<p><em>How to Do Things with Myths</em> assembles a radically updated collection of Ivan Strenski's oft-cited publications on myth. Together they tell how theories of myth have changed and led to a novel performative theory of myth.</p><p></p><p>Beginning from its mid-nineteenth-century foundations with philologist Friedrich Max Mu?ller the study of myths had been conceived in textual terms as quasi-biblical static narratives. Not until the advent of ethnographic studies in the early twentieth century did myths come to be regarded <em>in situ </em>as living agents shaping their societies when French sociological critics most notably Émile Durkheim and his équipe led a movement against Mu?ller's static textual view of myths. The Durkheimians felt that myths mattered because of what they did by functioning within human societies. Bronislaw Malinowski adopted the Durkheimian notion of function but as a pragmatist and positivist he narrowed his conception of myths to utilitarian terms.</p><p></p><p>In place of Malinowski's utilitarianism Ivan Strenski proposes a performative theory of myths-a theory that opens myths to a wider range of agency in culture unrestricted by Malinowski's behaviorism and positivism. Conceived as important stories myths can thus do things in subtle and unquantifiable ways depending upon a culture's own value system. Conceptually and theoretically Strenski's performative theory situates itself with respect to the efforts of some of the most popular contemporary myth theorists including Bruce Lincoln Mircea Eliade Claude Lévi-Strauss Georges Dumézil Robert A. Segal and Jonathan Z. Smith.</p>