Mythe et remous historique
A Lunda Response to De Heusch
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12002793 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J Jeffrey Hoover (Yale University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1978 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Pages | 63-80 |
| Publication date | 1978-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History in Africa (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0361-5413 • E-ISSN: 1558-2744 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3171479 |
| OpenAlex | W2161438457 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
| References cited | 7 |
Oral traditions are the common patrimony of a varied group of scholars. Although professional historians embraced African traditions only in the late 1950s, local -- and usually amateur -- historians had been writing from them throughout the colonial period and occasionally before. Meanwhile, students of anthropology and comparative religion from Frazer on have been studying the same traditions from very different perspectives. They have pointed out the common motifs recurring within the genre in widely scattered and disparate areas, and have related myth to its functions in present-day society, watching how it is molded to fit changing realities. At the same time that academic historians at last began to overcome their doubts about the historical value of African oral traditions and began to use them, a French anthropologist was propounding a new approach to myth, a principle he called “structuralism.” Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that even the seemingly most direct and least stereotyped American Indian traditions he examined were actually philosophical expositions of world-view and religious belief encoded in symbolism. This article tests the structuralist approach through a detailed critique of one particular example of its application. Luc de Heusch, a Belgian disciple of Lévi-Strauss, has recently studied the traditions of Lunda state formation as myth in Le roi ivre, ou l'origine de l'Etat . His aim is to discover the univers intellectuel of the Lunda and the other peoples of the Central African savanna, but his work touches the historian in two crucial respects. First, he highlights dangers in the path of the naive and helps paint parts of the larger human dimension in which historical events and historical records have existed
Amateur · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Epistemology · Ethnology · Humanities · Literature · Mythology · Oral tradition · Sociology · Structuralism (philosophy of science · African history and culture analysis · African Studies and Ethnography · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Classics · History · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.11 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1979 - 2008 (30) |
| Highly cited | No |