in a search of mythopoetic thought

Wiley and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access toEthos.

http://www.jstor.org

In Search of Mythopoetic Thought Author(s): Douglass Price-Williams Source: Ethos, Vol. 27, No. 1, SPA Presidents' Forum (Mar., 1999), pp. 25-32Published by: on behalf of the Wiley American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/640601Accessed: 07-05-2015 08:37 UTC

REFERENCESLinked references are available on JSTOR for this article:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/640601?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 200.16.5.202 on Thu, 07 May 2015 08:37:19 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

In Search of Mythopoetic Thought DOUGLASS PRICE-WILLIAMS

The beginning of my career in psychological anthropology was concerned with cognition. Later I turned to matters more in- volved with emotion, such as dreams, shamanism, and imagination. Throughout, I had given serious consideration to a kind of thinking that has been variously described in anthropology as

"primitive mentality," "magical thought," and sometimes "mythopoetic thought." I gave limited attention to the subject first in the context of waking dreams (Price-Williams 1987) and later in the context of imagination (Price-Williams 1997). The subject extended beyond the confines of anthropology into the domains of psychology and linguistics, indeed being touched on also by philosophers, proving more complex to deal with than it seemed at first sight. My contribution to this issue of Ethos summarizes further reflections on this subject.

Turning first to matters of definition and philosophy, it should be noted that it was a classical scholar, Frederick Myers, who coined the term mythopoetic function at the end of the last century to refer to a kind of autonomous function of the mind to weave fantasies, while in a twilight state (Ellenberger 1970:314). Myers was not concerned with the targets of inquiry of anthropology, but his term opened the door for a more system- atic investigation of the uses of spontaneous imagery. Ernst Cassirer elabo- rated profusely on the notion of mythical thought, recognizing like Myers a state of mind that hovered between the world of dream and "the world of objective reality" (1975:36), but insisting mainly on the identity aspect of mythical thought. There is a passage that is very characteristic of his line of thought: "Where we see 'representation,' myth, insofar as it has not yet deviated from its fundamental and original form, sees real identity. The 'image' does not represent the thing; it is the thing" (1975:38). This is a thought echoed much later by Michel Foucault (1973:67-71) in talking about symbols. When he stated that whereas for the contemporary West- erner symbols mean representations and are purely arbitrary devices of

Ethos 27(1):25-32. Copyright ? 1999, American Anthropological Association.


26 * ETHOS

references, this was not so in our own middle ages, where symbols followed the path of resemblance. So far as I can tell, Cassirer's arguments about mythical thought have never made much impact in anthropology, although speculations about a nondiscursive form of thought have abounded.

I am going to argue that there has been a sharp bifurcation in the treatment of mythical thought in anthropology: most scholars follow what I call the representational or formal aspect, while others focus on the identity, bonding, imaginative sides of mythical thought. I will simply call this the emotive aspect of mythopoetic thought, as it is emotional issues that fire the mechanism. We see this separation also in psychology, and to a certain extent in linguistics. Levi-Strauss has to stand out as the prime example of the formal or representational approach in his treatment of mythical thought. Indeed, all scholars of the structuralist school follow this emphasis. While one can find references to the play of emotion in mythical thought in Levi-Strauss's writings, the tendency has been to work out the formal aspects only. Levi-Strauss does indeed acknowledge the importance of emotions. His main thesis of myths playing the mediating role between polar opposites suggests the underlying emotional forces operat- ing. Further, he himself has said,

[C]ontrary to what certain critics have said, I do not underestimate the importance of the emotions. I merely refuse to give in to them and to abandon myself, in their pres- ence, to the kind of mysticism which proclaims the intuitive and ineffable character of moral and aesthetic feelings. [1981:667]

The focus on coding and associative (paradigmatic) modes has tended to overlook the undoubtedly powerful emotive forces that are expressed here.

Although saying something different in her treatment of "nonlineal" thinking among the Trobriand Islanders, Dorothy Lee (1962) nevertheless is adhering to the formal or representational aspects of thought. A strong rebuttal of this position was made by Edwin Hutchins (1983) in an article called "Myth and Experience in the Trobriand Islands." It is noteworthy that Dorothy Lee focused on mythical texts while Hutchins illustrated the Trobriand thought processes in the realm of land litigation. Charles Her- berger (1972) actually used the term mythopoetic to describe the thinking of the ancient Minoans; his meaning of this term is basically equivalent to the employment of analogy and synthesis. Siegfried Nadel (1977) consid- ered that magical symbolic thought is shaped from social symbolic thought; but again, this falls into the formal aspects of thinking. Some of the contributors to the book Modes of Thought (Horton and Finnegan 1973) focus on analogical reasoning in magical thought. Overall, most of the chapters tend to suffer from an overinclusion tendency. Dichotomies and contrasts are made too facile, thereby missing the middle ground.


In Search of Mythopoetic Thought * 27

For example, as the introduction by Horton and Finnegan makes clear, rational is opposed to irrational, scientific thought is opposed to traditional thought, differentiated is opposed to undifferentiated. When we turn to affective emphasis, the name of Levy-Bruhl primarily comes to mind. His original ideas (which were later rejected by field anthropologists and partly by Levy-Bruhl himself; see Cazaneuve 1972) included such notions as "mystical participation" and statements that the content of perception in so-called primitive mentality is strongly colored by and invested with emotion.

While most scholars have rejected his theses, it is worthwhile noting that no less an authority than Evans-Pritchard (1966:6) has made some positive comments: "Nevertheless, the evidence cited by Levy-Bruhl is im- pressive and much of it is given by authorities who beyond question must be respected as knowledgeable and trustworthy. So, even if Levy-Bruhl's conclusions about primitive mentality can no longer be accepted quite in the terms in which he set them forth, it is a plain fact that much of the thought of primitive peoples is difficult, sometimes almost impossible, for us to understand, in that we cannot follow their reasoning because the underlying assumptions on which they are based, while taken for granted by them, are totally alien to us." Horton (Horton and Finnegan 1973: 251-252) made the crucial point that for Levy-Bruhl, "the key to the in- terpretation of primitive thought lies not with reason but with emotion." However, for anthropologists at a much later date, emotional involvement with myth is still recognized.

Michael Young (1983:14), for instance, made the comment that mythic thought "is affective rather than intellectual, a matter of moods rather than ideas." The affective dimension is further seen in the role of imagery that is aroused in such situations as shamanism and religious imaginations. Richard Noll (1983) focused on the vivid imagery among shamans cultivated by various psychological and physiological tech- niques. Michele Stephen (1989:54) emphasized the seemingly autonomous nature of imagination in the religious context of her New Guinea studies-indeed, she established "the distinctiveness of autonomous imagining as a mode of thought." Professor Stephen-in discussing at length my ideas on the mythopoetic function in my chapter on "Waking Dreams"-preferred the term autonomous imagination, thereby placing it in the information-processing model of imagery rather than in the dynamic psychiatry model that "mythopoetic" entails. I would have no quar- rel with this so long as the imaginative aspect is solely at issue. But I do need a term that brings in the cultivation of autonomous images, and autonomous thought would surely not do. So I fall back to the use of the term mythopoetic again. If anybody would be generous enough to suggest a more appropriate term, I would happily listen.


28 * ETHOS

In his Malinowski Memorial Lecture, Percy Cohen (1976) severely criticized Cassirer for not presenting independent evidence-that is, independent of myth itself-for the idea of mythopoetic thought. Actually, there was independent evidence, but it lies outside anthropology, does not necessarily refer to myth, and is in a distorted and often pathological context. The material can be found in Rapaport's (1951) compilation of early psychology and psychiatry writings on what was referred to then as primary process thought, associative thinking, autistic thinking, and other names of this kind. The history of psychological notions regarding thinking similarly betrays a similar distinction between formal and emotive.

Early psychiatrists such as Jung, Freud, and Bleuler contrasted what they respectively called directed, secondary, and logical thinking with nondirected or associative, primary, and autistic thought. The latter types are all in the context of emotional intrusions. Vygotsky's notion of "complex thinking" also belongs to this class (see Rapaport 1951 for the references for all these psychologists). On the formal or configurational side, we find a psychological parallel between the linguistic syntagmatic and paradigmatic distinction from the direction of information processing in Ulrich Neisser's (1967) distinction of sequential and parallel mental organization. A combination can be found of both affective and formal em- phases when the contrast of undifferentiated versus differentiated is made, as in Werner's book, Comparative Psychology of Mental Development, when he said that "it is characteristic of primitive mental life that it reveals a relatively limited differentiation of object and subject, of perception and pure feeling of idea and action" (1973:59).

When we continue our search into the field of linguistics, we immedi- ately find the linguistic equivalent of mythopoetic thought in the concept of tropes (see Fernandez 1991 for following references), taking this term to differentiate, as does Professor Ohnuki-Tierney, the poetic meaning of symbols from their semantic referential meaning. Paul Friedrich's "image" and "modal" tropes clearly are prime markers for our mythopoetic thought. Going back further, into the writings of structural linguists, mythopoetic thought is mirrored in those linguistic concepts that have come under the heading of similarity relations. It is pertinent to note that some of the older linguists were quite aware of the relationship between their concepts and psychology. Jakobson (1973:119-124), for example, linked metaphor with the Freudian notion of identification and metonymy with displacement, the first being an example of similarity relations, and the latter an example of contiguity relations. Umberto Eco (1984:114) also connected metonymy with displacement. The very terms similarity and contiguity were used in Gestalt psychology. However, the analysis of metaphor, sometimes accepted as the "master trope," has since become entan- gled in the pursuit of cognitive grammars, cognitive models, and the like,


In Search of Mythopoetic Thought ? 29

thereby accentuating the formal aspects of mythopoetic thought. This leads us to reconsider the basic meaning of mythopoetic thought.

In discussing the logic of practice, Pierre Bourdieu remarked, "Prac- tice has a logic which is not that of the logician" (1990:86). Over 300 years ago Pascal said, "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." In a similar vein, I am going to suggest that mythopoetic thought is really not thought, at least as we understand it. We are constrained by our own ethnopsychology, going back at least to the days of Kant and Tetens, when thought was firmly demarcated from emotion, which has influenced psychology, and thus psychological anthropology, ever since. It is as if we have (following the physiology of the brain) placed mythical thought in the cortex (albeit the right cortex) and emotion in the thalamic areas, disre- garding that there are presumably thalamic-cortical tracts connecting them.

Fortunately, we have a word that can substitute for "thought": that word is simply "understanding." Its suggested usage is not simply a nomi- nalist preference-the word carries a different psychological meaning, which we see when we use the German term verstehen, particularly as it was treated in the philosophy of Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911). Dilthey had contrasted those disciplines, such as the natural sciences, in which the objects of inquiry were set apart from the observer, with those disciplines, such as the study of history and culture, in which the individual's personal lived relations with her or his own social milieu become a factor. This division led Dilthey to formulate a psychology based on explanation (kerklarende) from a psychology based on understanding (verstehende). Understanding, then, reflects shared expectations in a common cultural setting, requires empathy and intuition, and unites observer and observed. It involves to a degree emotional bonding and thus indicates the underlying state of mind that we are searching for.

Moving away from the narrower term thought to the wider term understanding also allows us to pay attention to tacit behavior that requires the attentions of sociolinguists and discourse analysts insofar as much of it is carried in prosody, in pauses between utterances, in jokes and puns, and the like. It also requires the skills of the ethnographer for observing gestures and the context of communication. The apocryphal flower ser- mon of the Buddha is a classical example of mythopoetic understanding. One would expect to find mythopoetic understanding exercised in those areas in which precise semantics and unspecified reference are absent, and it is in such areas as religion, magic, and myth itself that we do note it. I already noted that the people of the Trobriand Islands used it for myth but not for litigation. It took a physicist, Werner Heisenberg, to make the point that the language of religion "is closer akin to poetry than to the precision-oriented language of natural science" (1985:42).


30 * ETHOS

As these areas are loosely called collective representations, there has developed a dichotomy between individual thought and that found in collective representations. For example, Gustav Jahoda, while agreeing that "collective representation such as myths cannot serve as the basis for in- ferences about the characteristics of cognitive processes," goes on to say that "it would be foolish to deny any connection between ideas and beliefs held in common by a group of people and their thinking" (1982:236). But the issue is not really between individual and collective thinking, nor, as I have pointed out, is it really about thought.

Mythopoetic understanding is equally available to the individual as to the group, and cuts across all societies, technologically advanced or not. It is not really at odds with discursive thinking, as its ends are different, although misunderstandings and even pathology can be engendered if mythopoetic understanding is misdirected. Probably much of the difficul- ties of primary process thought lay in applying mythopoetic understanding to areas where discursive thought was more appropriate.

Also, Freud's designation of primary process thought as immature suggests the idea of its development. As imagery in shamanism is developed, so can mythopoetic understanding. Other cultures may have nur- tured this development. Pendlebury, in his translation and discussion of a Sufi classic treatise, noting that Arabic and the Arabized languages of the Middle East are extremely sensitive to homophones and to multiple mean- ings of the same word, made this relevant comment:

This is perhaps a good moment to question the somewhat facile assumption that because in our culture the fascination of secret codes, rhyming, punning, spoonerisms, etc., tend to wane with the onset of puberty, such activities are inherently childish and immature. Indeed when we find a culture, like Sanai's, in which these preoccupations persist, in corresponding more sophistic forms, right into adult life, we may even begin to wonder why capacity seems to atrophy so soon in the West. Far from having out- grown an infantile mode of behavior, it may be argued that we have failed to develop its potential adult stage-a very valuable counterweight to the hypnotic power of linear verbal communication. [1976:61-63] In our own culture it would seem that in an earlier time there was an

ability to operate at different levels; Dante advised his readers that they should read his writings first literally, then at three different symbolic stages (Frye 1983:221). Anthropologists will remember that Kogi shaman- ic pupils were instructed in different ways of perceiving a loom: first as a tool for weaving, then as a representation of a woman's sexual parts, then as a topography of the land, and finally as a representation of the Milky Way (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1978). Such considerations have led me to a ten- tative conclusion that it is possible to detect a mode of communication and comprehension that, for lack of a better term, can be called mythopoetic. I continue to wrestle for a better delineation and gauge its implications across a number of different domains, such as the transmission of myths,


In Search of Mythopoetic Thought ? 31

narrative construction, religious beliefs, and political persuasion. Though this is a brief exposure, it may help to indicate my line of thought.

DOUGLASS PRICE-WILLIAMS is professor emeritus in the Departments of Psychiatry and Anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles.

NOTE Responses to this article can be submitted electronically to the editors at [email protected].

edu. Commentary and critique will be posted in the Shadow Ethos area of the journal's website (www.cwru.edu/affil/spa/ethos.html), which is permanently under construction as a zone of dialogue between Ethos authors and readers.

REFERENCES CITED Bourdieu, Pierre

1990 The Logic of Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cassirer, Ernst

1975 The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: Vol. 2, Mythical Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Cazaneuve, Jean 1972 Lucien Levy-Bruhl. New York: Harper Torchbooks.

Cohen, Percy 1969 Theories of Myth. Man 4:338-353.

Eco, Umberto 1984 Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press.

Ellenberger, Henri 1970 The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychia-

try. New York: Basic Books. Evans-Pritchard, E. E.

1966 Foreword. In The "Soul" of The Primitive. Lucien Levy-Bruhl. Gateway edition. Chicago: Henry Regnery Company.

Fernandez, James 1991 Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press. Foucault, Michel

1973 The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.

Frye, Northrop 1983 The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Heisenberg, Werner 1985 Scientific and Religious Truths. In Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the

World's Great Physicists. Ken Wilber, ed. Pp. 39-44. Boston: Shambala. Herberger, Charles

1972 The Thread of Ariadne: The Labyrinth of the Calendar of Minos. New York: Philosophical Library.


32 * ETHOS

Horton, Robin, and Ruth Finnegan 1973 Modes of Thought: Essays on Thinking in Western and Non-Western Societies.

London: Faber and Faber. Hutchins, Edwin

1983 Myth and Experience in the Trobriand Islands. The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition 5(1):18-25.

Jahoda, Gustav 1982 Psychology and Anthropology. London: Academic Press.

Jakobson, Roman 1973 Two Aspects of Language: Metaphor and Metonymy. In European Literary Theory

and Practice: From Existentialism to Structuralism. Vernon W. Gras, ed. Pp. 119-124. New York: Dell Publishing.

Lee, Dorothy 1962 Freedom and Culture. New York: Prentice-Hall.

Levi-Strauss, Claude 198111971] The Naked Man. New York: Harper and Row.

Nadel, Siegfried 1977 Magical Thinking. Canberra Anthropology 1(1):1-14.

Neisser, Ulrich 1967 Cognitive Psychology. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts.

Noll, Richard 1983 Mental Imagery Cultivation as a Cultural Phenomenon: The Role of Visions in

Shamanism. Current Anthropology 26:443461. Pendlebury, David

1976 Afterword to Hakim Sanai: The Walled Garden of Truth. Translated and abridged by David Pendlebury. New York: E. P. Dutton.

Price-Williams, Douglass 1987 The Waking Dream in Ethnographic Perspective. In Dreaming: Anthropological and

Psychological Interpretations. Barbara Tedlock, ed. Pp. 246-262. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1997 Discussion: The Heritage of Imagination. The Psychoanalytic Review 84(2): 169-172.

Rapaport, David 1951 Organization and Pathology of Thought. New York: Columbia University Press.

Reichel-Dolmatoff, Gerardo 1978 The Loom of Life. A Kogi Principle of Integration. Journal of Latin American Lore

4(1):5-27. Stephen, Michele

1989 Self, the Sacred Other, and Autonomous Imagination. In The Religious Imagination in New Guinea. Gilbert Herdt and Michele Stephen, eds. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Werner, Heinz 1973 Comparative Psychology of Mental Development. New York: New York International

Universities Press. Young, Michael

1983 Magicians of Manumanus: Living Myth in Kalauna. Berkeley: University of Chicago Press.


Article Contentsp. [25]p. 26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32

Issue Table of ContentsEthos, Vol. 27, No. 1, SPA Presidents' Forum (Mar., 1999), pp. 1-114Front Matter [pp. 1-2]From The Editors [p. 3]Comments by John and Beatrice Blyth Whiting [pp. 4-6]Anthropology and Human Nature [pp. 7-14]An Agenda for Psychological Anthropology [pp. 15-24]In Search of Mythopoetic Thought [pp. 25-32]Toward an Integrated Social Science [pp. 33-48]Perspectives from a Varied Career [pp. 49-53]Residues of a Career: Reflections on Anthropological Knowledge [pp. 54-61]Why Cultural Psychology? [pp. 62-73]Reflections [pp. 74-88]Why are There So Few Women Presidents of the Society for Psychological Anthropology? [pp. 89-103]A Behavioral Orientation [pp. 104-114]Back Matter

in a search of mythopoetic thought

Documents