Role Of Myth Research Articles

Viscum Album—Magical Plant of Complexity and Paradox

This article explores myths associated with mistletoe for the purpose of revealing the hidden meaning of the little understood remedy, <i>Viscum album</i>. The role of myth in expressing unconscious processes is described. The author brings to light the parallel between what is already known about the remedy and the themes of the myths, which include journeying into the depths of the psyche, immaturity and dependence, as well as the presence of a dangerous aspect of the psyche that Jung called the ‘shadow brother’. A case treated by mistletoe as well as indications and themes of Viscum album are included.

The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle ed. by John Walker (review)

Reviewed by: The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle ed. by John Walker Arnd Bohm John Walker, ed., The Present Word: Culture, Society and the Site of Literature; Essays in Honour of Nicholas Boyle. London: Legenda, for Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2013. xii + 204 pp. A festschrift honors someone or some event and also recognizes the celebrants, the members of a select community. The person being celebrated here is Nicholas Boyle, immediately familiar for his magisterial Goethe biography, of which two volumes have appeared so far. He is less well known for his concerns about the current state of the world of learning—and of the world—as signaled by his Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (1998) and by his 2014: How to Survive the Next World Crisis (2010). The wide range of Boyle’s interests does not exceed the capable reach of the fifteen contributors to this volume, although the whole does demand sturdy readers, ranging as it does across German literature from the Baroque to Thomas Mann but also including Shakespeare, Les Murray, and Seamus Heaney. More than half of the contributions deal directly or tangentially with Goethe. John A. McCarthy’s “Cognitive Mapping: Adam, Venus, and Faust” is a complex discussion that brings together the most recent neuroscience with paintings by Michelangelo and Giorgione to shed light on Faust. The short essay by T. J. Reed, “Goethe as Secular Icon,” is part of a long-standing disagreement with Boyle’s interpretation of Goethe the poet. It is a supplement to the critical review of the biography Reed published in 2001; he proposes that Goethe’s stance was marked by “delighted assent” (47) and not just by absences. Charlotte Lee’s contribution is “Mignon and the Idea of the Secret.” Regina Sachers shows unexpected parallels between Goethe’s “Urworte. Orphisch” and Mörike’s “Besuch in Urach.” Ritchie Robertson touches on, among other things, Egmont and Die natürliche Tochter in assessing Goethe and Machiavelli. Martin Swales compares Iphigenie auf Tauris and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in “The Human Epiphany.” Christoph Jamme in “Enlightened Mythology: Thomas Mann and Myth” and John Walker in “Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and the Site of Literature” deal with a question that remains alive for modern literature: namely, what the role of myth can or should be. Walker connects this with Boyle’s concern for “the theological and cultural meaning of the secularization of the Christian tradition” (109). The triangulation of the relationship between theology, literature, and mythology continues to be a pressing issue. What is the connection between [End Page 318] faith and knowledge? That the question is not of recent origin is shown by Helen Watanabe O’Kelly in her all-too-brief “Ways of Knowing: Blaise Pascal, Angelus Silesius and Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg.” The inclusion of two poets who might be unfamiliar to Germanisten can only be a benefit. Ian Cooper focuses on one poem by Les Murray, Australia’s great poet. He elucidates him via Roland Barthes and Caravaggio, placing him at the center of European tradition. Seamus Heaney is revealed to have been anything but a marginal Irish writer in Eamon Duffy’s “Seamus Heaney and Catholicism.” Duffy reads Heaney’s career and works, tracing the move from minority status in Northern Ireland to the struggle to reconcile the tensions between poetry and faith in troubled times. Boyle’s convictions as a citizen of his country as well as of the republic of letters are foremost in H. B. Nisbet’s “‘Just One Damned Thing after Another?’ Some Reflections on the Philosophy of History,” in Mark Ogden’s “Christian Humanism and Higher Education,” and in Paul Connerton’s “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Nisbet’s reflections on the rise of history are thoughtful, as always. Mark Ogden grapples with the thorny issue of whether universities today can resist commercialization and can sustain ethics. It remains for Connerton to draw attention to the importance of forgetting in our modern consciousness as he surveys types of nonremembering. His few telling paragraphs on how the Germans managed...

Reading Nostalgia

Reading Nostalgia

José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, edited by Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011

AbstractDescribed as ‘the most original and innovative Latin American Marxist’ by Michael Löwy – a sentiment repeated by many others – the work of José Carlos Mariátegui remains a largely untapped resource in the Western Marxist tradition outside of specialist circles. This review essay considers the recent publication of a translation and anthology of Mariátegui’s work into English by Harry Vanden and Mark Becker as a first step towards correcting this trend. It highlights Mariátegui’s understanding of race, power, and identity; the combined and uneven development of capital; and the role of myth and voluntarism in revolutionary struggle as key points in which the early-twentieth-century Peruvian contributes to contemporary debates in Marxist praxis in Latin America and beyond.

If they come, we will build it: in vitro meat and the discursive struggle over future agrofood expectations

According to recent literature in the sociology of expectations, expectations about the future are “performative” in that they provide guidance for activities, attract attention, mobilize political and economic resources, coordinate between groups, link technical and social concerns, create visions, and enroll supporters. While this framework has blossomed over the past decade in science and technology studies, it has yet to be applied towards a more refined understanding of how the future of the modern agrofood system is being actively contested and understood. I seek to redress this gap by using the sociology of expectations to explain the discursive topography surrounding in vitro meat, a nascent agrofood technology whereby processed meat products are developed from stem cells as opposed to live animals. In discussing the obstacles and challenges which confront the proponents of this technology, I utilize three key concepts from the sociology of expectations: (1) hype, (2) retrospective prospects, and (3) the role of myth, metaphor, and ideology. I find that despite sluggish results and financial setbacks, the controversial legacy of previous agrofood technologies, and persistent cultural skepticism, the core ideological justifications for in vitro meat have proven to be resilient in buoying the technology through rough discursive waters.

Blight’s Oracles

Blight’s Oracles Gaines M. Foster (bio) David W. Blight. American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. 328 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $27.95. A book on Civil War memory by David W. Blight commands attention. His justly celebrated Race and Reunion has shaped historians’ understanding of how, by 1913, the public memory of the war had developed. In it, Blight shows how white Americans celebrated the heroism and honor of both sides, focused the meaning of the war on the preservation of the Union, and de-emphasized, if not ignored, its role in ending slavery. As a result, what he termed the emancipationist legacy of the war was ignored, and reunion came at the cost of rights and advancement for African Americans.1 Blight returns to these themes in his new book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Blight takes his title from Robert Penn Warren: “And so the Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of personal, as well as national, fate” (p. vii). It may not be Warren’s clearest sentence; if the war serves as an oracle, it is certainly one that speaks through others. Blight examines “the works, and to some extent the lives, of four of America’s most important writers on the subject of the significance and legacies of the Civil War during the 1950s and 1960s”—Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin (p. 7). Blight chooses these four because of their differing backgrounds and perspectives but also because they all have “an intense interest in the power of epic events, in the role of myth in shaping how people gain a sense of history, and in the consequences of human strivings, with their residues of violence, failure, and possible renewal” (p. 10). All wrote during the civil rights era, which explains the subtitle. Blight begins with a brief discussion of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” in which King evoked the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. (Blight does not mention another reference to the war famously not made during the March on Washington: John Lewis’ call to march through the South as William Tecumseh Sherman had—a reference Lewis was convinced to leave out of his address.)2 After his discussion of King’s address, Blight then rightly argues that the “Civil War and civil rights have been forever intertwined in [End Page 699] American history and mythology” (p. 2). Civil War symbolism and memory did play a role in the civil rights era, particularly among white Southerners, and historians need a study of that influence and also of how the battles of the 1960s reshaped the memory of the 1860s. That is not the story Blight chooses to tell. Blight does consider his book “a look at the Civil War Centennial era, not primarily at the level of institutions or of popular culture, but through serious literature and historical narrative” (p. 28). In his introduction, Blight recounts how civil rights issues impinged on the Centennial, drawing primarily on Robert J. Cook’s excellent study, Troubled Commemoration: The American Civil War Centennial, 1961–1965 (2007).3 Blight’s book complements Cook’s, which remains the best source on the Centennial. The two, though, differ in interesting ways. Of Blight’s four authors, Cook mentions only Warren and Catton. Cook does not discuss Wilson’s Patriotic Gore, but perhaps he should have. Blight observes that Wilson’s book generated review essays on the war “like nothing else published during the Centennial” and received a great deal of critical attention (p. 171). The major difference in the interpretations of the two books, though, may be in their assessment of the public memory of the war during the Centennial. Cook sees some growth in the acceptance of a black counter-memory and questions whether the Lost Cause still held great power. He even doubts that it proved influential enough for radical segregationists to rally white Southerners around an imagined Confederate past. Blight’s account implies that the Lost Cause still held sway, certainly in the South and...

Constructing Myth in Modern China

This study presents an overview of attempts by Chinese literati during the twentieth century to articulate a coherent Chinese mythology, primarily based on ancient texts but eventually to some extent drawing from ethnographic materials and folklore as well, and all much beholden to Western examples such as Greek and Norse mythology. This examination of text-based activities sets the stage for an inquiry into a wave of monument building during the Reform Era, much of which has celebrated China's ancient myth, history, and legend. A recent park in Wuhan dedicated to the legendary sage ruler and conqueror of floods, Yu the Great, serves as a case study of how, over the last three decades, old Chinese myths have been inscribed on the new Chinese landscape, and allows exploration of this phenomenon in relation to deeper issues concerning the role of myth in Chinese society, particularly its unexpected marriage with modernity.

Italian Intrigue in the Baltic: Myth, Faith, and Politics in the Age of Baroque

Abstract This article examines the role of myth in Italian cultural politics in the Baltic region during the Baroque era. A special focus for this analysis is the legend about a “kinship” between the Florentine Pazzi family and the Lithuanian noble family of the Pacas (Polish: Pac), known in the sources of the seventeenth century as “the Pazzi in Lithuania.” This legend prevailed particularly in the second half of the Baroque period, having developed under the influence of different political, religious, and social aspects of Baroque culture. It played an important part in the Papacy’s interests in Poland-Lithuania during the Counter-Reformation and in the commercial activity of Italian merchants in the Baltic, which coincided with the expansion of the monastic orders in this region and the cult of St. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, to whom the Pacas family expressed their devotion.

Do you believe in Father Christmas? The role of myth and symbol in understanding student support

It was two days before Christmas. Presents not wrapped, decorations still in the box and food unprepared. I was trying to finish my PhD for a January deadline. The section I was working on was abou...

The myth of shared governance in higher education

In terms of the role of myth in decision making, this paper focuses on the way myth obfuscates critical issues related to shared governance in higher education. The result of that obfuscation is a minimization of the realities that work against shared governance by favoring an untenable view based on an idealistic and unattainable vision of shared governance. First, however, a critique of myth is in order to demonstrate not only that myth is no more than ordinary interpretation but also that it is insufficiently based on rationality and can become a dangerous instrument in the hands of policy makers.

TWO MYTHS OF CONVERGENCE IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT REFORM

The literature on public management reform exhibits two intertwined convergence myths. First, a world-wide consensus on a new public management (NPM) reform agenda is seen to exist amongst policy reformers and practitioners. If this agenda is not fully implemented in all cases, this is generally explained by political and reform setbacks rather than disagreement on policy aims. Second, this NPM agenda is now seen as challenged and even abandoned and replaced by an emergent post-NPM or ‘public value leadership’ agenda and/or policy paradigm. We show the NPM convergence is overstated, with a remarkable resilience of existing institutions, and a diversity of public management systems. On the other hand, even within NPM exemplars that have putatively now adopted a post-NPM agenda, there is debate to what degree NPM has been abandoned, and over the novelty, coherence and resilience of the post-NPM agenda. Divergence and contextual variation prevail. The role of myth in policy reform is further examined.

The Philosopher's Stories: The Role of Myth in Plato's Pedagogy

In this essay I will argue that Platonic myths are a useful tool not only in the education of the ignorant but for the philosophical mind as well. To do this I will first examine the limitations and problems that Plato sees in written communication, and I will then argue that myths avoid these problems by undermining their own validity. If they are to avoid the problems that plague the written format, myths must show themselves for what they are: inadequate tools for giving a complete account of a particular subject. Myths, I will argue, are those shadows (to use the term from the story of the Cave in the Republic) that show their own shadow-like nature. In this way the myth is able to work hand-in-hand with dialectic to educate philosophers.

Introduction

If recent discussions of Schmitt in these pages have made a broad case for the centrality of culture for his thinking, the current issue both specifies and generalizes this approach. The specificity derives from our focus on one key text by Schmitt that is often passed over but is in fact crucial for understanding his work. The generality is a result of the breathtaking sweep of issues that this text opens up for the contributors to this issue: the relation of sovereignty to popular will, the ontological status of modernity, the role of myth in society, the representational structure of…

Finding Myth and Motive in Language: A Narrative of Organizational Change

Our article defines myth as “ideology in narrative form” and explores the role of myth in an organizational change story. Following Roland Barthes we show that when word meaning shifts from first- to second-order semiology the myth that develops within the second-order semiology of a discourse may become a determinant of change outcomes. Here we tell a story of a symphony orchestra that operated as a self-governing co-operative for its first 25 years but, influenced by the storying of second-order semiology, it undertook a radical change: it adopted a corporate style of governance. We explore this change as an example of a restructuring that was assumed to be managed rationally but was in part mythologically driven.

On the Role of Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity in Modern Europe

On the Role of Myths and History in the Construction of National Identity in Modern Europe

THE MYTH OF THE GRINGO CHIEF: AMAZONIAN MESSIAHS AND THE POWER OF IMMEDIACY

In this article, I investigate the sociocultural grounding and sociopolitical position of Randy Borman, the “gringo chief” of the indigenous Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador. Born to North American missionary-linguists, Borman grew up in Cofán communities, attended school in urban Ecuador and the United States, and developed into the most important Cofán activist on the global stage. I consider him alongside other ethnically ambiguous leaders of Amazonian political movements, whom anthropologists have described as “messianic” figures. The historians and ethnographers who write about Amazonian messianism debate the relationship between myth and reason in indigenous political action. Using their discussion as a starting point, I propose the concept of “mythical politics,” a type of transformative action that concentrates enabling forms of socio-temporal mediation in the shape of individual actors and instantaneous events. I develop my approach through a discussion of the work of Georges Sorel, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci, three theorists who debate the role of myth in political mobilization. By applying their insights to the case of Borman, I explore the relationship between myth, mediation, and rationality in Cofán politics and political movements more generally.

Salary surveys as institutional myth: ritual, validity, reality

The use of dialectics and social construction theory can help expose rationalized institutional myths used to create useable knowledge. This discussion presents a popular technique, advocated and used among public officials when establishing pay scales, called a salary survey. Salary surveys appear rational because they use logical positivist (quantitative) methods to illustrate a “truth” that is actually “symbolic.” This process is institutionalized when pay discussions and decisions are required to proceed on the basis of salary surveys. Salary surveys take on the role of myth when they become accepted by officials as an “objective reality” without a thorough examination of the biases and assumptions. This study uses the ritual, validity, reality dialectic to illustrate how administrators construct and shape reality through social interaction. Through this dialectic, some officials may want to question their acceptance of salary survey practices and consider the recommendations offered in this article.

Myth and Collective Memory in the Case of Robert Johnson

The blues musician Robert Johnson (1911–1938) is the subject of an extensive literature, both popular and academic. Previous work has examined his biography, his musical style, and the dynamics of his posthumous reputation. I focus on the Robert Johnson myth as embodied in stories about how he learned to play guitar, how he lived and died, and his posthumous influence. This myth grew in successive refinements of its own structure and self-reinforcing success. This case study in popular memory shows the role of myth, narrative, and audience reception in the construction of a remembered character.

Knowledge is everywhere: a philosophical exploration

In this article, I would like to argue that interdisciplinarity belongs to the very nature of knowledges in their diverse manifestations and any disregard for this idea would mean a distortion of knowledge while creating at the same time a situation that puts not only individuals but humanity in general in danger. The role of myths, paradigms, the position beyond-method, and the impact and interference of knowledges on each other, that illustrate the point of a universally distributed intelligence, is used as arguments in the development of this statement. The nature and scope of the danger is spelled out as well. Ways and strategies are proposed that should be invented to avoid this danger for the well-being of all human beings in their societies.

The Role of Myth in Plato and Its Prolongations in Antiquity

Plato was the first author to use the term mûthos (myth) in our modern sense.1 He described the role of myth in Athens, in order to contrast it with an argumentative philosophical discourse aimed at the truth. Even so, he had recourse to this unverifiable story not only in a practical role, in order to persuade the citizen to obey moral norms and political laws, but also in a theoretical context, evoking premises from which philosophical discourse could develop, and picturing realities such as the soul, that could not be grasped by either the senses or the intellect. With the disappearance of the city-state and the constitution of Kingdoms and Empires, the social and political aspects of myth tended to disappear in the Mediterranean world, allowing the soul to take “centre-stage.” While theogony, cosmogony, and anthropogony persisted, they did so only to provide a framework for a vast drama—that of the salvation of the human soul—as described in the Chaldaean Oracles and the treatises of the Sethian Gnostics.