Dumezil, again

From: David Gadbois <gadbois_at_cs.utexas.edu>
Date: Sun, 5 Mar 1995 02:37:28 -0600

A while back Nick had recommended reading Georges Dumezil for some wacky insights into constructive mythology. I have not yet followed through on reading up on his stuff, but, while reading James Miller's excellent "The Passion of Michel Foucault," I stumbled across the following on page 135:

"Trained in the old-fashioned evolutionist approach to folklore that English anthropologist James Frazier had used in 'The Golden Bough,' Dumezil in the 1920s reansformed his method after studying Durkheim and Mauss. Like Levi-Strauss, he came to embrace one of Durkheim's key propositions: That the concepts and supernatural beings of myth
'collectively represent' important social and cultural realities.
Unlike Levi-Strauss, however, Dumezil never claimed to have dicovered universal forms that inhered in the human mind; instead, he emphasized the temporal and spatial limititations of the structures he studied.
'For me the word "structure" evokes the image of a spider web often
used by Marcel Mauss,' he once explained. 'In a system of thought, when one draws on a concept everything comes with it, since between all the parts run threads.'"

The references cite C. Scott Littleton, "The New Comparative Mythology" and Arnaldo Momigliano, "Georges Dumezil and the Trifunctional Approach to Roman Civilization."

So, it appears that Dumezil and Mauss are very well worth reading, especially if you are trying to understand how that zany Dara Happan culture could have possibly resulted in the Lunar Empire. Does anyone have any recommendations as to where to start?

• --David Gadbois

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