scholia - University of Otago

'Invention, Guilt and the Fall from Innocence', T. E. Knight
harsh and conflict-riven environment. 15 Whatever characteristics are socially
desirable are developed and reinforced by rituals and formalized interactions,
which serve to strengthen acceptable patterns of feeling.
It follows from these remarks that. from a comparative view of different
cultures, the specific content of feeling is to some extent culturally determined
and relative. One culture may allow its subjects a wide and rich range of
feeling, another may impose deep layers of self-restraint upon its subjects, so
that the feelings of which its subjects are conscious are particular to their
culture. To this extent, feeling is a socially articulated aspect of consciousness,
since the feeling-content of experience is determined by an awareness of what it
is socially allowable and acceptable for one to feel. Paradoxically, feeling-the
subjective valuation of experience-operates both as an automatic, habitual
reflex and as something learned or acquired. One's experience within the
community repeatedly reinforces the reality of certain feelings, and disallows
the emergence of other feelings. One's social position determines the content,
quality and stmcture of the feelings experienced, and the feelings experienced
in tum support the social role which the personality fulfils. The range of
possible feelings narrows and the feelings become increasingly particularized
as the person matures. The complex of feeling-content that is allowable and
socially acceptable in any given society operates within a systematic social
ecology.
There is one further clarification that must be made before we can
proceed to the consideration of the role of feeling in myth, and this concerns the
essential distinction between feeling and emotion. Simply put, emotion is a
response to an immediate situation confronting the organism and is
physiologically measurable in a heightened pulse, a faster rate of breathing, an
increase of perspiration and other innervations. Feeling, on the other hand, like
thinking, is a durative and persistent pattern of consciousness which has only
very subtle physiological effects. 16
Pertaining to the function of myth in archaic cultures, two essential facts
about myth are relevant to our inquiry. The first of these is the principle that in
archaic cultures myth-telling is a form of collective recollection. Mythic
narrative reproduces a supernonnal reality which stands distinctively apart from
normal experience. The re-production and re-creation of this reality by the act
of narration is not so much a going back to something factual as it is a doing
15 P. T. W. Baxter, 'Repetition in Certain Boran Ceremonies', in African Systems of
7lwught: Studies Presented and Discussed at the Third International African Seminar in
Salisbury, December 1960 (London 1965) 64-76.
16 Jung [8) 411 f. s. v. 'affect'.
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