The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas Volume I, II, and III

Testimonies 53
history extended back more than one hundred years. The culture history of the
tropical-forest people can be inferred only from the distribution of linguistic
groups and of cultural features. The linguistic evidence, together with some oral
history, permits the reconstruction of certain migrations. 21
This longstanding North American skepticism about "history of Indians"
coincided with a theoretical critique from a different quarter,
hostile as well to attempts at "Indian history." For Levi-Strauss, historicity
itself was a local peculiarity of the West. Societies lacking Europe's
attachment to change as a source of meaning (its historical "hotness")
demanded a form of empathy less captive to time and more similar to
the schematisms of mathematics. Levi-Strauss's 1962 The Savage Mind
persuaded many that Amazonian narratives, irrespective of narrative
tense, used the past only as an idiom and were meaningful rather as
repositories of logical relationships among elementary categories. Like the
steps in solving an algebraic equation, structuralists suggested, narratives
are sequential in form but express a total set of relationships that is
simultaneous or timeless. What facts or fictions a historically "cold"
narrative uses as tokens is by this argument all but irrelevant both to its
local meaning and to its scientific value.
In the resulting debate - the "myth and history" debate - "myth"
was usually taken to mean a class of narratives that explain the categorical
makeup of the world as it is by referring to a time when the laws of
nature did not operate as they do now and categories were labile. In
mythic time, prototypical events usually described as ancient (but perhaps
outside time altogether, insofar as mythic reality remains accessible
through dreams or visions), set the world into a shape on which human
events only embroider finite variations. Myth was usually understood as
a form of social self-consciousness, that is, a story a society tells about
itself in more or less fantastic idiom but with more or less conscious
reference to received truths. Relations among mythic beings often compactly
and concretely express what more complex societies would express
as ideological abstractions.
In this view, myth sets a limit on consciousness: It cannot make
culture an object to itself. The mythic outlook, which treats natural
beings as cultural (e.g., mythic animals and humans form a single society),
in the end clothes cultural forms in seemingly unquestionable,
unanswerable naturalness.
Levi-Strauss developed this view around Amazonian village societies.
21 Julian Steward and Louis Faron, Native peoples of South America (New York, 1959), 287.
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