Talk:Mythème

The term mythéme is a neologism coined by Claude Lévi-Strauss by analogy with phoneme, and used to describe the elementary units employed in the structural analysis of wp:myths.

the smallest possible units of meaning within a language system (Levi-Strauss/Structuralism): the smallest unit of signification in myths (analogous to *phoneme); building block of structural anthropology.

Term used occasionally in a structuralist context.

Lévi-Strauss used the word "mytheme" to indicate the smallest unit of myth (by analogy to the phoneme being the smallest unit of speech that can distinguish one statement from another statement, like the "d" versus the "b" in dog/bog). It's a faulty but useful analogy. It's faulty because a phoneme is itself meaningless, whereas a mytheme (understood as a sort of primary element of the mythic story) can be an event, for example, which is not meaningless in itself. It's useful because once the mythemes are identified, they can be aligned with other mythemes in particular kinds of arrangements (to other mythemes in time [diachronic] or to other mythemes in the same myth [synchronic], and so on). These arrangements are structures, hence the term "structuralism" to describe the overall process. Isolating the structures can reveal interesting things that have to do with many things from sociology to psychology.

Levi-Strauss's famous article on the matter is "The Structural Study of Myth," in Structural Anthropology, translated by C. Jacobson and B. Schoepf (Doubleday, 1967).