the serpent's children: semiotics of cultural genesis in Arawak and Trobriand myth

While functionalist accounts of myth have generally yielded to structural analyses since the appearance some 25 years ago of Lévi‐Strauss's essay, “The Structural Study of Myth,” the relationship between myth and that analytical entity called “culture” is still unclear. The difficulty can be traced to an unfinished anthropological dialogue about what culture is or what cultures are, and how it/they can best be described. My central thesis is that anthropologists have tended to regard their subject matter—culture—as a received object of study and that they have been mistaken in this tendency. The article proposes to regard “a culture” as generated meaning, a motivated affirmation of a system of differences. Establishing the semiotic form of two Arawak and Trobriand origin myths helps to show how anthropological theories are themselves composed. A textual criticism of one theory of myth—Malinowski's—is combined with an analysis of two bona fide “primitive” myths. The comparison indicates that the myths provide better theory about the dynamics of cultural identity than does the theory of myth , [cultural theory, semiotics, myth, Malinowski]