Myths

At the simplest level, myths are stories. The term has come to signify a particular class of narratives that is globally significant because they are distributed universally across human time and space. Myths achieve a high and abiding cultural status in the societies out of which they emerge insofar as they tend to be retold, passed on, reworked, and sometimes recorded. Myths are typically regarded as constituting an important part of a culture's oral and/or written tradition, situating members within their societies as well as in the wider human and natural cosmos. For discussions of global phenomena, the usefulness of the concept of myth is tied to debates about modernity and its sociopolitical, economic, and cultural impacts and localizations around the world. Because of this, and because the term myth derives its salience within the Western academic tradition, it cannot be assessed independently of what Ashis Nandy and Vinay Lal have referred to as the “imperialism of categories”—that is, the epistemological hegemony of the modern Western scientific enterprise—especially in light of its influence on colonial and modernization projects in “Third World” or “developing” societies. Therefore, a consideration of myth in the contemporary global context must encompass postcolonial and ideological critiques of modernity. But this is not to argue that what is pointed to by the term myth is a Western invention. For all its Western baggage and entanglement with the history of colonialism, the term refers usefully to what appears to be the ubiquitous phenomenon of deeply sedimented but socially dynamic and significant kinds of stories. A fuller definition follows a brief consideration of the term's (Western) history.

The Greek term myth (mythos; μvθoς)—literally, word, speech, narration—appears in Homer's and Hesiod's stories of gods, heroes, and supernatural beings. In Greek philosophical tradition, certainly by the time of Platonic rationality, such stories about gods and heroes are considered unbecoming and untrue even if sometimes socially useful. Similarly, early non-gospel Christian literature approaches the stories of imperial Rome's gods as falsehoods, launching a polemic against polytheism that would accompany the geographically expanding Roman Church as it encountered other pagan societies. Such critical animus toward other people's mythic stories had a long precedent in the Judaic sociocultural milieu out of which Christianity arose. Here too, monotheists excoriated the stories associated with idolatrous beliefs of neighboring powers and imperial overlords (Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Hellenistic Greek, Roman), often by assimilating motifs from these cultures’ myths into its own literature and recasting them to implicitly critical ends. This sometimes virulent disdain of stories associated with the polytheistic religions of other peoples is a shared feature of authoritative textual streams and influential interpretive communities of all three Abrahamic monotheisms. Meanwhile, their own authorized stories are presented as literal, historical, and, in some cases, divinely uttered truths by textual fundamentalists in each of these traditions and are defended by them as generically nonmythic.

European modernity and its master narrative of Enlightenment also project a critique of religion, directed now at theologies, scriptures, myths, and rituals of all religions, including Christianity. Religions are regressive and superstitious; their stories serve only to subjugate believers. Parallel to this critique is the rise of university-based studies: of the biblical corpus, on the one hand, applying historical analyses to blunt or reframe the sharp religion critique, and later, “scientific” studies of the beliefs and lifeways of non-European, mainly colonial peoples, eventually establishing the disciplines of ethnography and of cultural anthropology where, nevertheless, Christian presuppositions often biased the formation of these fields’ analytical categories. Thus, from its modern inception, the study of myths involves Eurocentric, scientistic, and often Christocentric biases and arises in close association with Europe's colonial enterprise. Modern mythography has been prejudiced by such logical binaries as progress/evolution over tradition, rationality over non-rationality, the universal over the parochial, and so forth. Even anti-Enlightenment critiques from inside the West have contributed essentializing categories to the study of myth, taking disastrous form in constructions like the German Romantic notions of the Volk or an Indo-Aryan ethnic-cultural source, for example, or rather less perniciously, the archetypal collective unconscious. [Page 1202]Western theorizations of myth have only recently and gradually come to recognize the modern, colonial, Orientalist prejudices at their core.

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