Social anthropologist #ChrisKnight uses another source of indigenous voice – #Amerindian mythology – to interrogate Graeber and Wengrow’s oscillatory model, addressing their key question about ‘how did we get stuck?’ A structuralist binary lies at the heart of these mythic discourses, beating to a lunar cyclical rhythm. Although Graeber + Wengrow pay little attention to indigenous myths, he discerns ‘an uncanny fit’ between their ‘getting stuck’ thesis and a worldwide motif central to myths -- a preoccupation with loss of periodicity and movement between worlds. This is taken to a high degree of elaboration in the #Tucuna story ‘The hunter Monmanéki and his wives’ which opens 'The Origin of Table Manners', Vol 3, Lévi-Strauss’s 'Mythologiques'. The animal wives move through an algebraic sequence of structural oppositions, more and more handicapped by the increasingly absurd demands of patrilocal marriage. The last wife literally flies apart, split into 2 halves. This story's Amazonian voice explains how we ‘got stuck’.

#anthropology #Amazonia #myth #structuralism #Mythologiques #LeviStrauss

https://liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/10.3828/hgr.2022.6