The Wives of the Sun and Moon

Abstract

In much Native American mythology marriage is conceptualized as a monthly honeymoon interrupted at each dark moon by menstruation. Woman’s monthly alternation between marital sex and menstrual seclusion is coded as an alternation between her rival partners, Sun and Moon. Against this background, a Plains Indian myth attempts to come to terms with a novel problem. With the introduction of patrilocal residence, a woman must stay with her husband and his relatives even when she is menstruating. It is as if her two rival partners, instead of living apart, had come to occupy the same space together, limiting her movement and precluding her escape. Such permanency in marriage, overriding menstrual periodicity is experienced as a dangerous violation of ritual norms. Exploring the consequent difficulties and contradictions, the myth finds a way of validating the new arrangement. This story along with many others analysed by LeviStrauss analysis in the light of his own ‘exchange of women’ theory of human cultural origins. Re-analysed in the light of menstrual sex-strike theory however, it makes good sense, shedding light on the origins of women’s oppression. Intended as structuralism’s crowning achievement, Levi-Strauss’s four-volume Mythologiques (1970; 1973; 1978; 1981) is today scarcely read. Its publication provoked not acclaim but puzzlement, irritation and widespread disillusionment, contributing to a repudiation of structuralism and a more general loss of theoretical confidence among social anthropologists which has lasted to this day (Knight 1991: 71—87, 480-513). In this article, I argue that the problem with Mythologiques was not that it treated mythology as a source of information about the origins of culture, but that it started out from a radically flawed set of assumptions about cultural origins. Like most of the myths examined by LeviStrauss, the Arapaho story of The wives of the sun and moon (1978: 214-18) defies interpretation in the light of standard alliance theory I show that once Levi-Strauss’s model is stood on its head, the problems raised by this and related myths central to Mythologiques yield to a compelling, parsimonious and elegant solution.