How to Do Things with Myths: A Performative Theory of Myths and How We Got There

How to Do Things with Myths 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.

Beginning from its mid-nineteenth-century foundations with philologist Friedrich Max Müller, 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 in situ as living agents shaping their societies, when French sociological critics, most notably Émile Durkheim and his équipe, led a movement against Müller'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.

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.