Talk:Mythème

The mytheme is term used by Claude Lévi-Strauss to describe the

by analogy with phoneme, and used to describe the elementary units employed in the structural analysis of wp:myths.

the smallest possible units of signification within a language system (or wp:myth)

the smallest unit of signification in myths ; building block of structural anthropology.

Term used occasionally in a structuralist context.

Phoneme

Lévi-Strauss coined the neologism 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.