myth. A widely
and variously used term referring to a culture's way of understanding, expressing and
communicating to itself concepts that are important to its
self-identity as a culture. There are two main uses of the termthe
ritual/anthropological and the semiotic.

The ritual/anthropological
takes the form of an anonymously composed narrative that offers
explanations of why the world is as it appears to be, and why
people act as they do. It is specific to its own culture, though
it presents its explanations as universal, or natural. It is a
crucial means of turning nature into culture, and thus works also
reciprocally as a naturalizing agency.

The semiotic
meaning refers to an unarticulated chain of associated concepts
by which members of a culture understand certain topics. It
operates non-consciously and intersubjectively. It is
associative, not narrative; it is culture-specific, not
transcultural or universal; it changes over time, rather than
being eternal; and it is unarticulated rather than being
textually expressed. Its prime function is to make the cultural
natural, and it thus shares with other usages the function of
naturalization. [See: signification] [from: O'Sullivan, 1994]

myth. Traditionally, myth is an anonymous
tale relating heroic adventures, including encounters with the
supernatural, which explain the world in allegorical form and thus ratify a society's
beliefs and customs. 'Classical' myths, as one such set of
stories, have continued to shape literary and other contemporary narratives in the West and have come to comprise a
general cultural knowledge. Though this knowledge has receded in
the present century, some names (Diana, Hercules, Bacchus) and
stories from this tradition have continuing currency, if in
abbreviated or transposed form. The story of Oedipus, derived
from the Greek dramatist Sophocles and employed by Sigmund Freud
to name the oedipal complex is a prominent example of this. Meanwhile, in
what might be seen as a reaction to the centrality of
Graeco-Roman mythologies, other traditional myths, from Irish,
Caribbean, African-American and Indian cultures, have been newly
mobilized in the twentieth century in the affirmation or
re-making of national identities.

In some popular
uses the term has a very broad application, as in references to
'the myth of the American West', for example, or 'the myth of the
Orient'. In such cases, myth can imply a romanticized, distorted
or false set of attitudes and is therefore close to the sense of
'stereotype' or, in a sometimes lighter vein, suggests a
superstition or make-believe story. The 'myths' of black male
sexuality or of female passivity would be examples of the first
type while the 'myth of the Loch Ness monster' would be an
example of the second.

In cultural theory, myth was given importance through the work
principally of the structural anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss
(1908- ) and the literary critic and semiotician, Roland Barthes
( 1915-80). Levi-Strauss saw myths as setting basic, universal
themes in narratives which themselves follow universal
structures. A 'mytheme' is the unit of this universal structure
and can be differently articulated in individual myths.
Structural anthropology in this tradition reads myths as the
expressions of a narrative system and sees this as having the
function not simply of reflecting a society back to itself but of
resolving a dilemma or contradiction endemic to that society. The
term 'mythology' is used to describe the system of such; myths.
Levi-Strauss was led to conclude that myths were structured or
coded in this systematic way according to a universal human
mental disposition and as answering a collective human need.
However, the term 'mythology' has also been used to describe an
individual and esoteric system of coded symbols or symbolic
narrativesas in descriptions, for example, of the thought
of William Blake or William Butler Yeats.

In the work of Roland Barthes,
myth is virtually synonymous with ideology and designates a level of symbolic or
cultural connotation, active in a visual image or social narrative. Barthes developed
this understanding of the term especially in the essays entitled Mythologies
(1972a [1957]), a study of the activities and events of
contemporary French cultural life such as wrestling, striptease,
a new Citroen motor car, films and advertising. This has proved
an influential model for the study of popular culture. Though the term 'myth' might not itself be used
in this connection, the task of the cultural critic, following
Barthes, is thought to be to 'de-mythologize' the embedded
meanings of activities and representations as they shape and structure daily life, showing
how their implicit class and cultural attitudes have become naturalized. [from: Brooker, 1999]