SCHWIMMER, Eric - Is The Canonical Formula Useful For Cultural Description PDF

3 Is the Canonic Formula
Useful in Cultural Description?

Eric Schwimmer
Claude Levi-Strauss enunciated the canonic formula in 1955. He did

not refer to it frequently in his publications for many years, but
towards the end of his -career he found several occasions to say that it
was fundamental to his scheme of structural analysis of myth and,
hence, to structural anthropology. The paradox is that although his
scheme for structural anthropology has been immensely influential,
hardly any working anthropologists knew what to do with his canonic
formula. Recent studies by several specialists, especially Marcus, have
cleared up most of the obscurities that made application of the formula
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virtually impossible. This does not quite suffice, however, for showing
how ethnographers and ethnologists could usefully employ it in their
analysis. For this there are several reasons; one is, no doubt, that the
formula seems to be applicable across cultures, that it seems to derive
directly and non-historically from the human mind in general. If this
should be the case, then a science dealing with cultural variables
would have little place for it. But I do not think it is non-historical; log-
ical 'operators' are never non-historical because they cannot exist in a
historical void; they require a historical subject to 'operate' them.
A more serious obstacle is that 'myth' is a particularly difficult con-
cept, whose multiple aspects tend to become entangled with one
another. It is difficult even to enumerate all the specialties that talk
about myth: philosophy, theology, political science, history, psychol-
ogy, sociology, all the aesthetic disciplines - and the ethnological sci-
ences. No doubt, there is no limit to the ways in which anthropology
can make use of the canonical formula. As few ethnographers have so
Is the Canonic Formula Useful in Cultural Description? 57
far taken it up, I can contribute most usefully by just describing my

own approach, while stressing that I have no quarrel with any others -
past, present, or future.
In my analyses of Orokaiva society, 'myth' entered in three distinct
ways that may be epitomized as mythical thought, mythical structure,
and the mythic mode. Some other aspects of myth entered obliquely
(virtually all those listed in my last paragraph), but if my method of
enquiry is correct, it could be used to fit the other aspects. The canonic
formula is an aspect of mythical structure, but every time Levi-Strauss
demonstrates his mythic formula, his demonstration is imbricated in a
more general cultural discourse helping to interpret the text of the tale
and to arrive at what Marcus calls the 'essential story' (1993: 30). One
may call this the 'context/ but it is - more precisely - a paradigm,
arrived at by intertextual analysis, of the mythical thought underlying
the tale.
Finally, in an ethnographic approach to the canonic formula, the lat-
ter may be viewed in a historical world-literature framework, such as
was sketched by Northrop Frye. Unless this is done, it is hard to dis-
tinguish Orokaiva myth from Greek myth and, thus, to apply Levi-
Strauss's method to ethnographic discourse. It is by no means certain
that Levi-Strauss intended his formula for use in ethnographic analy-
sis, but he never objected to such a project. I introduce the 'mythic
mode' in order to help me distinguish between the kinds of 'mythic'
discourse that predominate in different types of cultures.
In the first section of this paper, I shall introduce the three concepts
enumerated above. In the second section, I shall look at the canonical

formula in the context of two semiotic concepts: mutations in the semi-
osphere and the theory of invention. It would seem that the 'formula'
is a cognitive rather than an aesthetic constraint, even though the
transformation of one version of a myth into another is often experi-
enced (by narrator and public) as an aesthetic event. We may thus dif-
ferentiate between two aspects of the formula: its structural aspect,
with which Levi-Strauss was almost exclusively concerned, and its
'mythic' modelling of indigenous accounts of transformative events, as
manifested in the history of Orokaiva (or any other) oral literature. The
third section of the paper looks in detail at instances where the 'for-
mula' models indigenous accounts of transformative events.
Finally, I shall discuss the typological aspect of the mythic mode and
the formula. It is clear that the formula, though universal, was set up to
analyse texts moulded by 'mythical thought' and expressed in the
58 Eric Schwimmer
'mythic mode.' But conversely, in cultures dominated by the mythic

mode, does the formula apply to all stories? No categorical answer can
be given, but it is illuminating to analyse Orokaiva tales as though the
formula applied, in order to reveal interesting hidden meanings in the
tales. Two questions will be raised: Do all tales where the formula
applies have mythic structure? If so, is mythic structure pervasive in
cultures that function in the mythic mode?
1. Mythical Thought, Myth and Literature, and the Mythic Mode
Mythical thought is a domain of scientific thought. According to Levi-

Strauss, the elements of mythical thought ('signs') are links between
images and concepts. 'Unlike concepts, 'signs' do not yet possess
simultaneous and theoretical relations with other entities of the same
kind. They are however already permutable, that is, standing in suc-
cessive relations with other entities' (1966: 20).
Although this definition is entirely clear, let us recall that it applies
principally to a particular type of culture and discourse. It thus differs
from a redefinition by J.-P. Vernant that superficially seems identical.
Vernant defines mythical thought as 'ce qui permet d'etablir, entre les
differents elements de la culture, lorsque la transmission et 1'apprentis-
sage du savoir s'y font par transmission orale, un jeu de correspon-
dances symboliques assurant la coherence, la stabilite, la permanence
relatives a 1'ensemble' (1980: 24). Here the phrase 'symbolic correspon-
dences' opens up fields of reference beyond the intentions of Levi-
Strauss. Thus, for the French reader, the word 'correspondances' is

'coded' as the title of Baudelaire's famous sonnet that speaks of 'une
tenebreuse et profonde unite' where 'les parfums, les couleurs et les
sons se repondent.' This poem speaks of an unbearable contradiction,
not alleviated by mediating events. It is not in the mythic mode; it does
not have the structure of the canonic formula. Nor does it contain
'mythical thought' in Levi-Strauss's sense, as the relations it sets up are
simultaneous and quasi-theoretical. They link symbols rather than
'signs.' I am not suggesting that no modern and contemporary litera-
ture contains 'mythical thought' in the sense indicated here, but that
most of it has a different foundation and is not in the mythic mode. It is
for this reason that I shall introduce literary typologies such as
Northrop Frye's.
The term 'mythic thought/ as used in this paper, is closer to theories
of Eco (1984), Auge (1988), Liszka (1989), and Maranda (1971), all of
whom apply it to any 'possible world.' The concept 'possible world/ as

developed in Eco's essay 'Lector in Fabula' (1979) and in similar ways
by other theorists, deals with 'concrete occurrences of semantic disclo-
sures and of inferential walks.' A possible world is not a bare but an
overfurnished set. It refers to 'pregnant' worlds of which one must
know all the acting individuals and their properties. There are, how-
ever, qualities of mythic thought, such as are brought out below as part
of Northrop Frye's interpretation, that suggest a slightly narrower
view of the category of 'mythic thought/ The finality of reducing radi-
cally tragic to 'liveable' oppositions is basic to Levi-Strauss' canonic
formula; it seems to me integral also to the category of 'mythical
thought/
Myth as a form of oral literature is usually defined by content criteria

only, but Finnegan (1992) singled out Bascom's definition (1965)
because it 'encapsulates so many commonly-held connotations of the
term/ There are also many 'conceptual' definitions of myth, but oral
literature specialists do not use them. Levi-Strauss (1963,1991) defines
and analyses myth as a type of narrative distinguished by its structure,
modelled by the canonic formula. All those tales, and only those, that
conform to the formula are classed as 'myths.' Maranda and Maranda
(1971) extends this mode of classification to other genres of oral litera-
ture and develops a family of models, governed by a set of purely for-
mal combinatorial rules of narrative structure, so that a 'myth' can be
distinguished from other genres and identified as having what one
might call a specifically mythic narrative structure.

It was only when I read Marcus (1993) that I fully understood the
meaning of the symbols used in the canonical formula. It would be
most useful now to compare the numerous structural theories propos-
ing a basic principle common to all narrative texts, but this is not my
purpose. Most of these theories, though dealing credibly with most
types of narrative texts, have difficulty with myths, because the para-
digms are very diverse and very hard to interpret. No ethnographer is
surprised by this difficulty. It would be amazing if theorists, sitting in
their studies, would be able to explain texts that remain obscure for
years to fieldworkers able to interview the narrators and all the other
sages nurtured on these tales. Interpretation depends on a vast array
of ethnographic and intertextual information. The distinctive quality
of Levi-Strauss's theory of myth is the immensity of the ethnographic
information on which it is based and its remarkable versatility in
60 Eric Schwimmer
establishing connections between apparently unhelpful bits of infor-

mation.
The uniqueness of Levi-Strauss's theory of myth lies precisely in its
respect for the 'concrete entities' of information of which each myth is
made up. By dividing each myth into a large number of 'mythemes/
each of which is an atom of narrative (hence a system of significant
relations), he built a store of 'concrete entities' that is dazzlingly large.
Though he attempted at one time to computerize this information, as
he relates, this attempt did not succeed, so that he was finally obliged
to rely on his own brain instead. I cannot judge whether this was
because of the limits of computer science twenty years ago, or because
of the fundamental unpredictability of the connections it is useful to
establish in each case.
There are two conceivable approaches. The first would be to treat the
'formula' as purely pragmatic: a vademecum proposed by an amazing
practitioner, useful to all others fumbling along the same way. The sec-
ond would be to examine its theoretical foundation and criticize it
from the viewpoint of its cogency or deficiency. It is probably best to
combine the two approaches.
The formula resembles semiotic theories of invention, including aes-
thetic invention, such as are offered by Saussure (see Jakobson 1975),
Peirce, Eco (1976), and Lotman (1977,1990). Marcus's excellent models
of the operations of the formula (1993: 19-22) mathematize also Levi-
Strauss's view of the processes entering into the construction or inven-
tion of a myth. As Marcus says (ibid.: 14), the relation :: in the canonic
formula 'has to be understood diachronically.' The formula proposes

'essentially a narrative structure' and the sign :: marks 'a segmentation
of this structure.' It marks the moment of mediation, when contiguities
are acquired and derived, and when initial oppositions are attenuated.
There is, however, one point in this Levi-Straussian mathematics
that needs particular emphasis because of the approach of my present
article. It is a point Marcus makes as follows: Levi-Strauss 'tries to
build formal dynamic models which point out the naturally uncon-
scious structure of societies and explain all observed phenomena by
means of some types of transformations, whose invariants express the
essential aspects of the process' (ibid.: 5). The scenario that interests me
occurs when I have already heard a 'traditional' myth several times
and its antiquity is attested by sources from the 1920s or even earlier. I
am then told a version I have never heard before. I can see a connection
between the innovations in the new version and the events of local his-
tory between the 1920s and the present time. Nobody will tell me the
tale is new; to the contrary, it is given to me as 'ancient.' Undeniably,
there are ancient versions of it, but the innovations are more than liter-
ary flourishes. They seem to me 'structural/ as there are transforma-
tions in either the message or the code.
When I write out the 'canonic formulas' of the old versions and the
one I have just heard, I find they are not the same. Changes may have
occurred in the 'terms' (sometimes even in the functions), and these
have led to consequential changes in the acquisition and derivation of
contiguities and in the attenuating of oppositions. I am not sure
whether these changes are fully described by the term 'naturally
unconscious.' I have no knowledge of the degree of consciousness. On
the other hand, the new text has references to recent political history as
well as to existing oral-literature texts. I recognize some of these refer-
ences myself, and those raised in the language and culture in question
can no doubt recognize even more of them. There may therefore be
good reasons to treat such new texts as inventions, prompted by his-
torical changes and literary intertextuality. In one case, the social
rewards gained by the inventors were clearly demonstrable.
On the other hand, even though the invention seemed to the
observer to have sprung from the brain of a single individual, there
were processes by which it was 'collectivized' before it acquired 'truth
value' and wider recognition. These collectivization procedures cannot
be ignored in the present study because, in their absence, the new ver-
sion of the tale would not have the 'truth value,' the cognitive function,
that is the very essence of myth as Levi-Strauss understands it. Though

there may be doubts about the degree of consciousness, there can be no
doubt of the 'praxis' involved in the transformative process.
The mythic mode is a term taken from Northrop Frye's 'Theory of

Modes' (1957, first essay). Though the theory 'deals chiefly with the
five epochs of Western literature/ in a somewhat antiquated evolution-
ary framework, its basic construction is perspicacious. The primary cri-
terion of its classification is 'by the hero's power of action.' 'If superior
in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the
hero is a divine being and the story about him will be a myth.' 'If supe-
rior in degree to other men and to his environment, the hero is a typical
hero of romance, whose actions are marvelous but who is himself iden-
tified as a human being.' Here we move into legend, folk tale, and so
forth. 'If superior in degree to other men but not to his natural environ-
62 Eric Schwimmer
ment, the hero is a leader/ This is the hero of the high mimetic mode, of
most epic and tragedy. 'If superior neither to other men nor to his envi-
ronment, ... this gives us the hero of the low mimetic mode, of most com-
edy and of realistic fiction.' 'If inferior in power or intelligence to
ourselves, the hero belongs to the ironic mode.'
Looked at from the viewpoint of, say, Orokaiva literature, this
schema becomes flawed at the edges. To begin with, the Orokaiva have
no gods that are superior to the environment. They are the environ-
ment. Moreover, as Orokaiva thought is not metaphysical, it is impos-
sible to say whether its heroes are superior in kind or in degree. Finally,
Frye's suggestion that myths 'are as a rule found outside the normal
literary categories' poses the question whether myth is a literary cate-
gory at all. If Frye's typology of heroes is meant to distinguish myths
from folktales, we need to look at some other postulates, some other
audience expectations, beyond the ones he enumerates here.
Another interesting distinctive quality of the mythic mode, sug-
gested by Frye (1978), is that in this mode 'the poet through whom the
gods speak - and with whom he may, then, be identified - is superior
to other men and the environment.' Among the Orokaiva, this quality
is restricted to tales narrated by those who have ancestral authority to
do so. Should we conclude that unauthorized utterances, of whatever
kind, are eo ipso excluded from the mythic mode, whatever their con-
tent may be? The Orokaiva would think so, because myth has a cogni-
tive function and if tales have no ancestral authority, they may amuse
but cannot enlighten. Contemporary Westerners would probably
disagree because their dominant literary mode is the low mimetic,

in which imaginative patterns carry more weight than the status of
the poet.
If we apply this criterion to folktales, we do arrive at a valid way of
distinguishing these from myths. For the Orokaiva tell many tales that
are not myths by any criterion, as well as tales that have the content of
myths but carry no ancestral authority. However brilliant such perfor-
mances may be, they cannot reveal ultimate truths about anything in
the universe, any more than Western folktales can. When some of the
same performances come from narrators who have ancestral authority,
those who share the same ancestors may accept them as revealing ulti-
mate truth, especially if secret names of the heroes are mentioned, for
these are sure signs of the performer's sacred status.
By thus shifting the primary criterion of his classification from the
hero to the status of poet or performer, Frye was led to discover some
other revealing qualities that support his theory of modes. Thus, if the
utterances of the poet through whom the gods speak are typically in
the mythic mode, Frye also said that in cultures such as Greek antiq-
uity, where the poet inspired by the Muses is superior in degree to
other men and his environment, the 'romantic' mode typically pre-
dominates. But the mode will also determine the dominant style of the
utterances themselves: the 'metaphorical language of imminence' pre-
dominates in the mythic mode, while the romantic mode uses meta-
phor in the 'metonymic language of transcendance' (Frye 1982). This
distinction was also made by Levi-Strauss when he described mythical
thought as made up of 'signs' in which images coexist with ideas
(1966: 20), an idea rediscovered by Wagner (1986), who shows Melan-
esian mythic discourse to be made up of 'metaphors that stand for
themselves.' Thus, a Melanesian will not typically use phrases like 'he
was a lion in battle,' except if the man referred to has leonine ancestors
or other concrete leonine associations.
The preceding makes it appear as though Frye was a great reader of
structural or post-structural anthropology. In fact, his inspiration came
from Vico and Blake, who likewise distinguished immanent metaphors
(tiger tiger burning bright) from similes (my love is like a red red rose).
Thus equipped, his theory of the mythic mode provides much more
than an evolutionary typology, as Frye (1978, 1990) also analysed the
'mythic mode' in Cervantes, Joyce, and Beckett. Without necessarily
believing in Vice's theory of historic cycles (as Frye did), we may note
signs of a growing convergence between Western contemporary and
mythic Melanesian modes. Does the 'canonic formula' help us to
understand Blake, Cervantes, Joyce, Beckett? Does it help us to under-

stand Orokaiva tales as literature?
Finally, Frye brings out the basic fact that the mythic mode can never
be tragic in the Aristotelian sense. 'In myth, the hero is a god, and
hence he does not die, but dies and rises again. Even Shakespeare, who
can do anything, never quite does this' (1957: 215). The diminution of
the opposition from the unbearable to the livable, treated by Levi-
Strauss as essential to myth, is consonant with Frye's notion of the
mythic and the mythic mode.
2. The Canonical Formula, the Semiosphere, and the

'Theory of Invention'
The primary function of the stories Levi-Strauss calls myths is cogni-

tive, though the aesthetic function (in the sense of Mukarovsky 1977)
may also be very important. In tribal cultures, where few major art-
64 Eric Schwimmer
works lack a practical cognitive function, it is equally true that few

instruments of instruction are without an aesthetic function. The term
'cognitive/ as used here, covers several kinds of knowledge between
which Westerners habitually make distinctions. One kind is positive,
historically based thought, dealing with material objects and tech-
niques of production, including those used in oral literature and other
artworks. Another kind of thought (called 'mythical' by Levi-Strauss)
serves to allocate the abundance of available signifiers among a
smaller set of clearly identified designata.
It is this kind of thought that predominates in the genre of narratives
the Orokaiva call ohihi. These tell of events that happened in the begin-
ning of the world: how plants and animals were created, how society
came about. The outside world treats these stories as either false or
'mythopoetic.' Younger Orokaiva have other sources of knowledge
that do not accord with the ohihi. Nonetheless, even they would clas-
sify a 'mythic' tale transmitted from father to son as hihi be (a true
story) rather than sokova (fabrication).
On the other hand, such a concept of truth contains no supposition
of universality; what is truth to a particular family may not be accepted
as truth by others. There can be as many truths as there are houses,
each house having its own truth. As there is much exchange of infor-
mation between these houses, the semiotic space of the Orokaiva per-
son comprises knowledge of many ohihi, including versions that his
own house does not regard as authoritative. At the same time, he
would recognize as basically correct much knowledge owned by
houses of his acquaintance. He would classify as sokova only such

knowledge as came from outside that network. It may be useful to
visualize, with the aid of Lotman's theory of the semiosphere, how the
semiotic space of the subject is constituted in such a culture.
There are three Western doctrines about connections between systems

of signs coexisting within the same cultural space. One proclaims sys-
temic heterogeneity (like Eco), one proclaims systemic homogeneity
(like Louis Dumont), while the third proclaims 'partial connections.'
Levi-Strauss probably follows the third of these doctrines, which does
not prejudge whether particular systems are connected or not. One of
the semiotic theories founded on partial connections is Lotman's. His
term 'semiosphere' is defined as 'the semiotic space necessary for
the functioning of languages' (1990: 123). Here 'languages' has the
extended sense of 'every system whose end is to establish communica-
tion between two or more individuals' - whether it be natural or artifi-

cial, and including customs, ritual, commerce, religious concepts,
theatre, cinema, painting, music, and so on (1977: 7).
The languages, verbal and non-verbal, that coexist in a culture are
distinct message systems. They may be partially connected only to the
extent that they are translated from one to another, as happens contin-
ually in any cultural system. The act itself of stating the content of a
myth in the form of a canonic formula is an act of translation. Produc-
ing a new version of a myth, inspired by new historic circumstances,
may also be seen as an act of translation. For the new facts belong orig-
inally to a different 'language' from the myth. In order to fit them into
the myth, they need to be treated 'in a different way,' leaving out most
parts of the facts but choosing just the parts that help to show the myth
in a new light. I could therefore say that the 'facts' have been translated
into the 'language' of the myth.
I shall give an example of the process whereby a song, originally
composed and performed by a woman at the time of her husband's
funeral, was translated twice so as to make the song to fit different
Orokaiva literary genres. Waiko descibes how the original funeral
chant (ji tan) may be transformed into a formal drum song (guru). As
he explains (1986: 28-9), 'the original ji tari is always a solo, the expres-
sion of an individual on a particular emotional occasion.' The conver-
sion of a ji tari to a guru, by contrast, 'is the work of a gifted poet and
singer' who gives the song 'a standardised structure' (1991: 371ff.).
There are in fact three stages of development. Once listeners decide a
song is transformable into a guru, they begin to perform it in groups.

Such performances are called ya tari, 'a secondary art form which
involves formalising the spontaneous songs.' Guru is sung 'to the
rhythm of drum beats. It may be termed a tertiary art form. There are
rules that govern the adjustment between ji tari and guru, remember-
ing the members of a clan from senior to junior, controlling the metre,
image, association, cue and repetition,' the division of roles between
first cantor, second cantor, and chorus. It is in the guru form (ya jiwari)
that the song is passed on to succeeding generations.
In these transformations, two dimensions may be distinguished.
One of these is content. In Waiko's example, it is only the relative status
of living and dead clan members that is being 'uniformized/ but by the
same token, the whole text may be edited for consistency with local
tradition. The second dimension is the degree of authority carried by
the information. In a 'primary art form' (as Waiko calls it), the only ver-
66 Eric Schwimmer
idicality is that the text conforms to the composer's true experience. In

a 'secondary art form' the entire group sharing in the singing of the
text exhibits its belief in the song's veridicality. On the other hand, if I
understand Waiko correctly, the performance is not yet, at that stage,
binding upon the clan ancestors; they have not yet testified to its verid-
icality. It is only the ya jiwari that provides this ultimate confirmation
and permits the song's transmission from generation to generation, as
it is only when the ancestors approve of a song that man is able to
transform it correctly into the guru form.
Levi-Strauss always insisted that the texts he analysed as 'myths'
were not individual utterances but had passed from generation to gen-
eration, thus obtaining a kind of collective sanction. Waiko's discussion
emphasizes that such transmission was neither automatic, nor was it
always the mere result of shared sentiments. Praxis entered into it. A
formal model of the creation of new versions of a myth does not, there-
fore, suffice to explain how this new version passed from individual
invention to collective sanction - that is, from its first performance to
its cognitive authority as 'myth.' My present discussion attempts to
treat 'myth' both as a system of logical transformations and as a system
of praxis.
Lotman's model of the semiosphere facilitates the integration of
these two kinds of analysis. The semiosphere is heterogeneous in the
sense that the connections between the various languages are partial.
The interconnections between them, owing to continual translation
activity, may create the illusion that they form a coherent whole. An
indigenous or outside observer may group together corpora of tales,

rites, dances, paintings, behavioural habits, and events, and say that
they show a common 'world picture' shared by people occupying the
same semiotic space. Even so, it may happen that several such 'world
pictures' continue to coexist within the same space, each supported by
distinctive institutions and treated as separate. Members of the group
acknowledge the relevance of each of these picture complexes and the
ways they contradict or support each other. Most of them are able,
without great anguish, to divide their time and attention between
them.
On the other hand, many of these group members do have ideolo-
gies that give a coherent, total world picture in which all these com-
plexes are brought together and integrated. Cargo cults readily explain
capitalist development, in suitably negative terms; development ideol-
ogy likewise has a ready explanation of cargo cults. Yet both ideologies
coexist peacefully in the same village. Likewise, oral literature, or any
other artwork, or even social sciences may offer a coherent overall
view of man's place in the universe, balancing out the various current
ideologies. Lotman applies the term 'self-description' to this imposi-
tion of apparent homogeneity upon the semiosphere. It is a regular
praxis of acting subjects, creatively influencing the course of cultural
history. The question arises whether the canonic formula of myth plays
a part in such equilibration praxis.
Though the semiosphere as such is a synchronic concept, Lotman

developed some models showing its transformations over time as well
as space. His first step was to distinguish between the centre and the
periphery of the semiosphere, and to study what happened at its inner
and outer boundaries. The peripheral is often a recent borrowing of
what used to be alien in the past. The periphery may also contain obso-
lete symbols that have been in disuse but revived by a recent revival of
an ancient tradition. Most of the mutations in Orokaiva semiospheres
come from exchanges between smaller local systems - villages, confed-
eracies, minuscule tribes, and dialect groups, still autonomous to some
degree in their images and symbols of the universe but continually
borrowing from one another while involved at the same time in tribal
or national ideological revivals.
Mythic structures are persistent and often widely distributed, but
specific narrations, songs, dances, theatrical performances, and visual
artworks show evidence of much experimentation. Ineffable nuances
cling to each version, depending on narrator, occasion, and public.

(Versions told to children and anthropologists are aimed at particular
levels of ignorance.) At the centre of the semiosphere we find a store
of mythemes on which the local culture founds its knowledge of life.
They are very generally known, recognized when even vaguely
alluded to. Closer to the periphery, stories are built on the traditional
mytheme store, but combine mythemes in unusual ways. Even fur-
ther from the centre are stories imported by a wife born in another
tribe, or by a local traveller returning from the coastal or mountain
boundaries of Orokaiva territory. Such exotic stories may become very
popular. The village intelligentsia may even adopt one of them as a
cornerstone of its ideological reflections. Some villages appear to have
a preference for stories belonging to the inner core of the semiosphere,
68 Eric Schwimmer
while others are vividly interested in the periphery. It may also be that
villages go through differently phased cycles of importation and tradi-
tionalism.
Is the canonic formula a suitable tool for modelling the invention of

myths? Can it help us to analyse the praxis of, for instance, the Oro-
kaiva, in whose oral literature the mythic mode predominates, and
who are active in transforming their view of the universe, in response
to changes in their intimate environment, under the impact of
upheaval in their overall circumstances? Such an inquiry would be
vain if modernization necessarily entails the abandonment of the
mythic mode, but recent anthropological studies in various parts of
Oceania suggest that mythic representations are versatile in accounting
cogently, logically, and ingeniously for radical upheavals.
It would be rare indeed for the creative subject to perceive the mak-
ing of a new myth or the transformation of an old one as a logical oper-
ation. He or she would more likely perceive it as a dream, a vision, an
illuminating mystery. It is only structural analysis that reveals the logi-
cal operations that might have produced the new myth, the uncon-
scious rationality and intelligibility of transformations that might
otherwise seem a mystery. If, after such analysis, a mystery remains, it
is not how the subject was able to arrive at the new myth, but why
myth corpora of small local groups have the versatility enabling them
in so many places to produce new views of the world by which they
survive the most radical and threatening changes.
This versatility may be due to the great complexity of the system of
functives expressed by the formula. While fully agreeing with nearly

all of Marcus's (1993) analysis, I need to make explicit a difference
between two possible views of these functives. Marcus (ibid.: 15) be-
lieves that the symbol /£/ in the equation is logically parasitic, and has
purely rhetorical value. He takes x,y to stand for 'classes' and a,b for
'members' of those classes. A more complex view of function was
expressed by Hjelmslev (1971 [1943], chap. 11): he takes the term as
standing midway between its logico-mathematical usage (as in Mar-
cus) and its 'etymological' usage. The two are not identical. The former
usage is 'closer to' Hjelmslev's intention, but inquiry into the latter
brings out that an entity functions in a given manner, plays a particular
role, occupies a specific position in the chain.
This last point is of importance in the 'canonic formula,' as any term
(say a,b of the formula) functions both as a 'member' of a paradigm
and as 'part' of a syntagmatic 'chain.' Levi-Strauss (1991, chap. 8)

brings out the same point when he mentions that functives like denta-
lia shells have a positive function in one part of the structure of the
myth set, but a negative function in another part of it. This observation
is directly relevant also to the data presented below, as not only the
ethnographer but especially the Orokaiva public knows a wide range
of variants, so that any change made by the narrator immediately calls
older variants to mind.
It is, therefore, not wrong to say that a 'function' specifies a relational
role/actor, but it may be incomplete. This is because, from one version
to another, the same actor may be given a different role, and the trans-
formation of his role may be the very issue leading to the production of
a new version. Or again, the same role may be given to a new actor and
this may signal a transformation of the tale message. Yet the old role or
actor may not disappear in the public's consciousness or from the text;
it is precisely through the intertextuality that the tale message acquires
a historical dimension relevant to what I seek to analyse. In fact, Mar-
cus's term 'role' is no more than an intrapolation, as the entity Levi-
Strauss calls a function (as early as his analysis of the Oedipus myth
[1955] and as late as Histoire de Lynx [1991]) is labelled by a moral qual-
ity. It is by a new attribution of moral qualities to actors that historical
change is marked in a new version of a myth. The 'network structure'
of a myth (see Levi-Strauss 1991:142) is not only a paradigm but also a
'chain.'
Just as each myth may be read as a narrative chain, so also the whole
literature corpus available to a community of historical subjects forms

a kind of chain, which appears to such subjects as arranged into two
paradigmatic/syntagmatic halves, the first of which presents an old
paradigm, while the second presents a new paradigm meant to replace
it. The 'canonic formula' offers two possible readings of the construc-
tion of a new myth: the paradigmatic reading gives its meaning, while
the historical reading reconstructs the conditions of its production.
The historical significance of the dentalia for Chilcotin 'praxis,' as
described by Levi-Strauss (1973: 307, 1983: 149-54), enters necessarily
into the field of reference of the canonic formula.
A final clue to the process of invention, as presented in Levi-
Strauss's myth analysis, lies in the two kinds of 'outcome' he attributes
to myth. He suggests three possible kinds of outcome: either the 'code'
is changed but the 'message' remains the same; or it is the other way
around; or both code and message may be transformed. In Eco's (1976)
70 Eric Schwimmer
theory of invention, which hews closer to Hjelmslev, the two concepts

used are 'code' and 'expression/ Eco suggests that invention occurs
when the subject finds that the content of the state of the world does
not (or does no longer) correspond to the established code, and that the
existing expression continuum no longer suffices for describing the
state of the world. The subject then elaborates the expression contin-
uum, which leads receivers to read the message as implying a change
in the code. If the invention is successful, it thus leads to the coding of
a new picture of the world and an elaboration of a finer expression
continuum.
Globally, Levi-Strauss's model is similar, though the term 'expres-
sion' does not apply directly, as he argues that myth is meta-linguistic
and its content is not modified by changes in expression. It seems to
me that the dialectical process remains similar, but the term 'message'
is substituted for 'expression/ which seems very apt for a kind of text
analysis focusing on cognitive transformations. One may say that for
Levi-Strauss the dialectic is between pure and practical reason, while
Eco's dialectic is, perhaps, between practical reason and judgment.
3. The Canonical Formula as a Model of Indigenous

Accounts of Transformative Events
Granted that the canonic formula as such reveals 'unconscious' struc-

tures, it may still be that the inventor of a new myth has a practical
sense of the rules for creating a tale in the mythic mode, according to
the canonic formula. I shall take as an example the case of the widely
known Orokaiva tale of the coconut girl, related by Williams (1928:
121-2), of which I also collected several versions in 1966-7. They all tell
how the girl impaled her lovers on her breasts, how they died, how her
father then killed her, and how a cocopalm grew on her grave. This
metamorphosis from girl to palm was the origin of the coconut.
A new variant was told to me by Samuel Jovareka Overo, of Sivepe,
who linked the old myth to an account of the origin of areca (Iteanu
and Schwimmer 1996). Here, the girl's last lover was the brother of her
brother's wife, a type of union anthropologists call sister exchange,
regarded by Orokaiva as ideal, because sorcery-free. She was killed by
her brother and buried next to her double affine, out of whose grave
grew an areca palm. She showered this grave with coconuts; he show-
ered her grave with areca. It was love beyond the grave. This version
alluded to a well-known mortuary rite placing a taboo on coconuts
and areca, produced on the land of the deceased, which are distributed
to his/her uterine and affinal relatives. It also alluded to the exchange
of sexual substance between man and woman, the woman's sexual flu-
ids being identified with areca while the man's were identified with
coco. Finally, the exchanges between the two palm species were identi-
fied with the exchange relations between the mountain and coastal
peoples of Oro province, as the mountain peoples own areca while the
coastal peoples own coco.
This new variant was told from the viewpoint of the brother, who
loved his sister even after all the deaths she had caused. It was he who
discovered the coco and areca palms on the graves and who deduced,
by careful observation of signs on the site, the miracle that must have
happened. This brother is a curious character, observer as well as per-
former of a mythic role. If we wish to construct the 'canonic formula,' it
is not immediately obvious who are the two main tale characters.
In the traditional versions, this poses no problem, as the girl's lovers
play only a subsidiary role. Those versions do not say that anything
grew out of the lovers' graves. In the new variant, the outcome of the
tale concerns several levels of the relation between the girl and her last
(double affine) lover. The first of these is the level of plant associations:
the two palms are growing side by side. This is an extremely common
sight in Orokaiva gardens today, but historically the phenomenon is
recent, as coco was introduced into the hill country after the Austra-
lians forced the Orokaiva to introduce them. The older association of
coco with the coast and areca with the hills is a theme of several Oro-
kaiva tales.
The second level is based on this plant association and illustrates the
relation between male and female: man is coco, woman is areca nuts.
This construction is inspired by the shape of genital parts, by the speed
at which nuts of these two species normally grow, by the speed with
which males and females are thought to reach orgasm, by analogies
between bodily fluids and fluids produced in the mouth when these
nuts are consumed. The third level of the tale outcome concerns the
relations between mountain and coastal tribes in Oro province today.
If we attempt to construct the canonic formula for this second vari-
ant, lover and sister now become a,b respectively. The order of the tale
functions has been inverted, so that loving/killing become x,y respec-
tively. This inversion is highly interesting because the many tales Sam-
uel Jovareka told me all placed the same primary emphasis on the
'loving' function. He was a man of peace, a Christian. Though a tradi-
72 Eric Schwimmer
tionalist rather than a doctrinaire mission follower, he interpreted Oro-

kaiva tradition as placing a higher value on love than on war. The third
component of the formula does not refer to the fact that the brother
killed his sister, but to the love gifts that the sister showered upon her
suitor, killed upon her pointed breasts. The transformations of the final
component have also changed: the new formula can be read only as
referring to the metamorphosis of the lover into an areca, while the nuts
collected at the graves become a substitute for the function of 'killing.'
In this conflation of 'killing' and 'collecting' into one function, I am
not relying on a theory but on the range of ordinary uses of the Oro-
kaiva verb kambari. It may often be translated as 'to bite' or 'to kill,' but
it is used also by a person collecting a gift to which he is entitled, by a
worker collecting his salary. According to Orokaiva philosophy, if gift
exchange relations are in the positive mode, we collect what is due to
us. If they are in the negative mode, we may kill. Killing is thus a form
of collecting; collecting is a form of killing. The two modes meet in
hunting: if I kill an animal, I believe it was left by my ancestor for me to
collect.
Levi-Strauss wrote: '[SJigns allow and even require the interposing
and incorporation of a certain amount of human culture into reality'
(1966: 20). I shall attempt to show how culture is incorporated into the
canonic formula: rather than develop a general theory classifying func-
tions and specifying a universal relation between killing and collect-
ing, the 'structuralist' tradition relies on 'local' mythological models.
The systems of transformations it studies are designed to hold only
within a set of related local models. Though this fact has long been rec-
ognized and applied, less attention has been paid to the mathematiza-
tion of transformative modelling as performed by members of cultures
such as that of the Orokaiva.
I hope to show that the Orokaiva are familiar with all the operations
used in the canonic formula, even though they designate them differ-
ently. It is because of this familiarity with relevant logical operations
that the Orokaiva are competent to transform one myth into another, in
apparent conformity with that formula. The logical operations of the
Orokaiva do not differ from Western deductive logic; but until the eth-
nographer knows the axioms, he may experience them as logical para-
doxes. Once he learns the axioms of the system, such paradoxes are
resolved. Let us consider the operations of the formula one by one,
while comparing them with available Orokaiva logical devices that
seem to permit - even encourage - the same operations.
As a first step, I shall consider the variants of the coconut-girl tale,

where both the original and the transformed myth correspond to the
canonic formula, and where the transformations follow standard rules
for Orokaiva logical operations. I shall analyse these operations as
praxis, that is, as historical action by local subjects. I shall then turn to
some other examples, where we find the same Orokaiva logical opera-
tions but where the result may not seem to correspond perfectly to
mythic structure. I shall avoid using the concept of 'mythic mode'
except for the purpose of identifying some tales that have a mythic
'feel' without having a mythic 'structure.' Looking at such tales, we
may find that they are truncated, implicit myths. Some of their essen-
tial operations remain unstated, usually because members of the cul-
ture take them for granted, but once these are recognized by the
analyst, the canonic formula may become applicable.
The two characters a,b At least four characters actually appear in the
coco and areca story and even more if we count all the dead lovers.
One might easily suppose that in reducing them to two, Levi-Strauss is
indulging his penchant for binary oppositions. On what basis would
the Orokaiva deny the status of main character to the lover in the tradi-
tional version of the myth, and deny it to the brother in the new ver-
sion? The short answer to this is that the Orokaiva are dealing with
male/female relations. In this respect the traditional variant would be
slightly more complex than the new one, as it deals with the father/
daughter couple, and with the wider range of uterine and affinal rela-
tions in which that couple is reproduced. The coconut as mortuary gift

is part of a system of mortuary exchanges well analysed by Iteanu
(1983:121-66). In Orokaiva marriage, the father/brother's rights to the
daughter/sister are temporarily ceded to the husband, but when the
husband dies, the clan resumes its rights as beneficiary of its clan-
woman's work. In the traditional variant, the father takes the coconuts,
the husband being dead, but in the sister-exchange variant the
brother's family cannot do so.
The new variant is just as 'binary' as the husband/wife couple
(terms a,b) that is replicated in plant classifications and in all the com-
plex symbolics of the exchange system traced by Strathern (1988) for
Melanesia in general, with some particular references to Orokaiva. In
this Orokaiva tale, the binary form of the canonic formula does not
therefore follow from any theoretical scheme, but from Orokaiva pro-
jections based on the fact of sexuality. Strathern takes pains to empha-
74 Eric Schwimmer
size that it is only in the West that male/female are regarded as

essences. In Melanesia, they are role attributes of members of living
species, including humans, in particular situations.
Apart from this general relation between terms a and b, their posi-
tion in the formula, in the tale, as well as in the Orokaiva construction
of reality is radically different. This point was made by Strathern when
she argued that Melanesian ritual and mythic representations distin-
guish between 'relations which separate' and 'forms which propagate.'
This terminology seems to me more useful than the one I suggested
earlier (Schwimmer 1974), between metonymic and metaphoric gifts.
In the traditional variants of the myth, inter-house relations are repli-
cated when the coconut girl, transformed into a palm, produces nuts
for her father to collect, thus allowing her natal house, at last, a return
for the fruits of her labour. I called such gifts 'metonymic' because the
donor repays only her labour, her fruits, that is, a part of herself.
Strathern calls this mode of personification 'mediated exchange/
while this mode of reification is termed 'gender replication/ Exchange
is mediated by the nuts and replicates, that is reproduces, intra-house
relations. This is one of the two basic forms of Melanesian sociality. In
the traditional variants, the coconut distribution 'separates' members
from non-members in that it sets up donor/recipient categories. The
dead man's house plays the role of donor, while the coco girl's house
plays the role of recipient. The term a in the canonic equation stands
for this kind of replicating relationship. The term b, which is called
'mediating' by Levi-Strauss and Marcus, may stand for many types of
prestations, often unmediated and propagating.
This difference in terminology is confusing and amusing, but it does

not mark any substantial difference between theories. In the traditional
variants, the father, caught in an unbearable contradiction, kills his
daughter who turns into a coco. This seems to be murder, but turns out
to bring into being a palm that propagates coconuts. This is, of course,
a mythic statement of what happens in 'real' life, as fathers do not usu-
ally kill their daughters, but give them to other houses in marriage.
When they have gone it may seem they have died, but it is only by
leaving that they can bear children, that is, propagate. Whatever term
one uses for this operation, it is the father who takes responsibility here
for the relations between his house and other houses. It is by separat-
ing himself from his daughter that, in this story, he safeguards his
house from hostile action by other houses. Any affinal bond between
houses has an analogous function of creating alliances.
It would obviously be a grave error to regard the function of replicat-

ing as 'essentially feminine' and the function of propagating as 'essen-
tially masculine.' Far from permitting such error, Strathern is careful to
specify that 'men' regularly fulfil 'feminine' ritual roles. In particular,
the father giving his daughter in marriage, regularly plays a 'feminine'
role in ceremonial dealings with his afh'nes. He presents gifts marked
as feminine. He submits passively, patiently to various forms of rag-
ging. In any case, in the new variant of the myth it is the lover meta-
morphosed into an areca who stands for the 'relations which separate'
(term a of the formula), while the coconut girl plays the role of media-
tor here, creating forms that propagate (term b of the formula), for rea-
sons that become clear below.
The two functions x,y The Orokaiva ascribe many virtues to both coco
and areca. These nuts have a vast number of ritual, medical, social,
nutritive, as well as cosmetic and erotic uses. They are thought, in a
general way, to be propitious for sexuality, to provide growth and fer-
tility. At the same time, man's store of sexual vigour is thought to be
limited, while all sexual activity (or sorcery, or anything that under-
mines social identity) is thought to deplete this store. Coco and areca
are useful, up to a point, in replenishing it, but not completely. All the
events of the old and new variants of the coconut tale are textually
marked as excessively invigorating, or as excessively depleting. This is
the 'problematic' of the tale in question. The nuts are invigorating but
the spikes on the stem are depleting. Anyone who is too eager to get at
the nuts is apt to be pricked by the spikes. The system of functions or

problematic, then, is binary like a simple feedback system. The palms
give a gloss and an inner well-being to the body, but they can be
climbed only by the young and energetic, at the cost of much energy
and risk.
There is no harm in saying that these are 'prepositional functions,'
like eros and thanatos, and that the coconut girl, her father, and her
lovers are 'arguments' to these functions. But if we pursue this syllo-
gistic analogy and go on to argue that eros and thanatos are 'roles'
played by the above-mentioned characters, we lose sight of the loose-
ness and complexity of the relation between levels. As we saw above,
the problematic set up by the two prepositional functions x,y (the two
kinds of operation of sexuality: loving, killing) is a familiar theme of
the Orokaiva system of thought; the characters a,b are acting out these
two kinds of operations - the daughter by inflicting deaths, the father
76 Eric Schwimmer
(in the traditional variant) by coping with the consequences of his

cherished daughter's actions. Yet, there is nothing obvious or familiar
about the idea that loving this daughter is so very dangerous; it is only
through this myth that this discovery is made. The so-called preposi-
tional functions are not prior to the events; one might just as well say
that they are entailed by them, that the heroes create the functions.
It is the role of the 'mediator' (term b in the equation) to change rad-
ically from playing one function to playing the opposite one. It is
through this change that the myth progresses from its initial to its final
segment, and a livable resolution of the problematic is achieved. In the
traditional variants the father progresses from (excessive) loving to the
killing that permits the replication of his house. In the new variant, the
daughter (who plays the mediation role here) progresses from killing
to allowing herself to be killed. Here, we meet with the kind of dra-
matic reversal familiar to ethnographers who have studied the positive
and negative forms of social exchange. When war breaks out between
houses, this is most often called mine (payback) in Orokaiva, signifying
an unbearable asymmetry in exchange relations. Again, peace-making
is a ritual performance, radically changing relations from systematic
mutual killing to the loving exchange of gifts. It may be that 'loving'
signifies here the ceremonial exchange of tokens of love rather than a
deeply felt inner state of affection, but the ceremonial casts the desired
change of relations into the state of peace. Thus, once again, the math-
ematics of the formula is 'covered' by ingrained ritual forms.
The unbearable contradiction leading to a moment of supreme crisis

seems to be a conventional breaking point in Orokaiva myths. The

moment of supreme crisis corresponds to the sign :: in the canonic for-
mula. As Marcus points out, this sign has a paradigmatic as well as
syntagmatic value. It marks the point of transformation of the prob-
lematic, but also the moment when the narrative takes a radical new
turn. One of the two key characters, whom we called the mediator,
changes his behaviour radically from one of the tale functions to the
other.
Now this is not the only way mythic texts may be read. Wagner
(1978), Meletinsky (1964), and many others have constructed non-
binary models, showing stages of progression of the hero in sequences
of problem resolutions. Such analyses of narrativity are of great inter-
est, but emphasize the syntagmatic aspect of the myths, reducing the
paradigmatic to a secondary role. This may not be an adequate repre-
sentation of the Orokaiva semiosphere, which tends to have two sepa-

rate spaces, one for an original pre-cultural state of the world and
another for its present state. The pre-cultural space is reconstructed at
initiations and other great ceremonies, where the passage to the
present cultural state of the world is re-enacted. Intermediate steps
may be added, but the two-state paradigm is basic to all curative and
state-changing magic. The binary paradigm of myth - even if addi-
tional segments need to be introduced into the formula - is therefore
well anchored in ethnographic reality.
Thus, in analysing any tale by the 'formula/ one needs to identify
the mediation process by which one state has changed into another,
which is not always easy. In the traditional variant of the tale in ques-
tion, the reader might be tempted to find two mediators: the father
and the daughter. How does the Orokaiva narrator decide, in each par-
ticular variant of the tale, which of the two fulfils the function of
separation/replication and which fulfils the function of propagation/
substitution? The fact seems to be that the Orokaiva perceive the tale in
several different ways, according to the outcome the narrator wishes to
emphasize. If the father is seen as mediator and hero, the outcome
needs to focus on his action. His action is not only killing his daughter
(the moment of crisis in this variant), but also releasing - by this act -
her coco nature, finding the coco growing in her grave, and enunciat-
ing rules about the conduct of mortuary ceremonies, still valid today.
He has heroic status as founder of these ceremonies at which coconuts
are principal symbols. The coconut as mortuary gift stands for a final
settling of accounts between agnates and uterines/affines. It is a gift

from daughter to father, mediated by coconuts, that serves to invigo-
rate their house. The capacity to invigorate, to increase propagating
power, is perceived as the coconut's basic biochemical quality. Yet
access to this powerful mediator is dangerous: coco remains associated
with the fatal risks of inordinate desire.
If the coconut girl is given the position of mediator, the structure of
the myth has to be transformed, as was done in Samuel Jovareka's
variant. Such a transformation may be spatial and temporal at the
same time, as it is here. It is spatial in that the variant belongs to Moun-
tain Orokaiva territory, where coco and areca are seen to grow side by
side. It is temporal, first of all, in that this plant association is modern,
'post-contact/ but also because Orokaiva narrators experiment with
the introduction of Christian values such as peace and conjugal love.
Yet it also recuperates traditional elements, absent in the older ver-
78 Eric Schwimmer
sions, that came in handy when setting up the new variant. The art of
the variant's creator was to see the relations between the old stories
and these new ecological and ideological elements and to find a way of
transforming the tale so as to take account of all of them.
It is here that the question arises. What are the minimal elements of a
myth transformation? Let us first consider that question pragmatically,
from the innovating narrator's viewpoint. Conjugal love is not credible
as an important value in an Orokaiva myth if it is viewed on the basis
of Christian catechisms. It becomes credible only if an analogy can be
found that appeals to Orokaiva sentiment and that has a place in the
Orokaiva mythic universe. Sister-exchange marriages are idealized
among the Orokaiva. They are free from sorcery danger, free also from
haggling over bride price, seeing that everybody receives exactly the
same as he gives. It is the absence of such impediments that is the
foundation of 'true love/ as understood in the present Orokaiva myth.
This explanation helps to show why the narrator added the areca to
his tale: it was because sister-exchange marriage is the best available
Orokaiva model for 'conjugal love.' The idea of coupling coco/areca
was a brilliant invention. Even though based on post-contact ecological
change, it is an example of true mythic thinking. The coupling of the
two species seems 'natural/ as both products are in the aesthetic/erotic
domain. Being anchored in botanical realia, such coupling transposes
the notion of conjugal love from the (still too exotic) metaphysical
plane to an intelligible Orokaiva sign system. This is the fundamental
cognitive operation in Samuel Jovareka's variant.
Once this step is taken, the role of head of the house, whose duty it is
to kill the coco girl, is transferred to her brother, who is married to the
sister of the girl's last victim. He becomes a helper and revered spokes-
man rather than a main character. The critical event in this variant of
the myth is the emergence of the two palms. Not only does the sister's
husband's sister (ZHZ) give coconuts, as in every variant, but the
brother's wife's brother (BWB) gives areca in return. This raises difficult
problems of tale construction, to which I refer below, but the theme of
the second segment of the tale is clearly the erotic/ecological relation
between these two characters.
In the second segment, this relation is described as symmetrical in
every detail, while the first segment opposes lover and coco girl as
killed/killer. The relationship is transformed from a 'killing' to a Tov-
ing' one. The two tale characters differ in the following features: the
'function' of the lover (a) was 'loving' from the beginning; he was
metamorphosed into the areca species after he was killed, after which
he always stayed in the mountain regions. As a species, areca repli-
cates itself and is an object of mediated gifts. The woman's 'function/
however, changed from killing to loving. Even when still alive, she
already had a coco nature. She was an embavo, a strange person doing
harm to herself and others. Her nature was the same, before and after
her death, even though her 'function' changed. After becoming a coco,
she mediated by helping to give coconuts, by helping to make betel-
nut, by acting as go-between to the Sea and Hill tribes.
Once these points are understood, it becomes evident that the Oro-
kaiva do represent the coco girl as a mediator; in changing her func-
tion, she becomes what she 'is,' a great benefactress, provided men
observe elementary prudence. On the other hand, areca alone does not
mediate. Climbing the palm is not said to be dangerous. The nuts are
given to a woman. They become powerful mediators, in many different
contexts, only after being mixed with hingi pepper. But the origin of
this pepper, in another Orokaiva myth, is the vagina. Before this pep-
per existed as such, men put the areca nuts in a woman's vagina to
obtain the rich red colour from which areca derives its potency. In the
new variant, the role of mediator, capable of conferring sexual potency
or political power, is characteristically woman's. Woman, like the coco,
moves from place to place (upon marriage); the man stays where he
was born. Woman enables man to exchange and prosper. The coco rec-
onciles traditional enemies. These gifts to the Orokaiva people (as a
whole) are 'mediated' in Strathern's sense: they are a sequence of direct

exchanges, requiring return gifts. The coco girl and the areca lover do,
however, join in 'unmediated exchange' (requiring no return gift)
when propagating themselves in their own graves.
This example shows how the formula may help the analyst. Some
critics have thought that when the analyst rules, in the case of this vari-
ant of the myth, that the terms a,b stand for lover and woman respec-
tively, this is because such a reading fits the formula. But that tells us
nothing about the culture. In the present example, it is Orokaiva theo-
ries about the gender of exchanges that have guided our analysis.
These theories differ in a few details, but conform in essentials, to
Strathern's more comprehensive regional models. They are not impro-
vised for the occasion, neither by the Orokaiva nor by the analyst. On
the other hand, the formula may help the analyst, as Marcus notes, to
80 Eric Schwimmer
recognize the mathematical pattern in 'the organisational ideas that are

present in any society' (1993: 37).
Function/term, term/function transformations On the basis of this myth,

it is hard to generalize about the transformation from term to function
and from function to term, as such transformations may be conceptual-
ized in various ways by Orokaiva. On the other hand, the concep-
tualization we meet with here, namely metamorphosis of a person into
a species, is extremely common. The two most common direct anteced-
ents of metamorphosis are being killed and killing oneself. The verb
sarikari refers to a death followed by a metamorphosis. Another possi-
bility is for the hero to metamorphose himself by expressing an inten-
tion of becoming a certain animal, of 'speaking the language' of that
animal (e.g., di dipo ke aisona - I shall speak dipo bird language), in
which case the hero metamorphoses himself without dying at all. Such
metamorphoses usually occur at moments of crisis, when the hero
finds himself facing an unbearable contradiction. They thus lead
directly to the outcome of myths wherein metamorphosis offers the
final solution to the contradiction. This is the case in the myth under
discussion.
Are such metamorphoses occasions where it is useful to say, always
or sometimes, that a tale character is being transformed from a term to
a function? Does Orokaiva literary praxis employ metamorphosis in
tales with some such ends in view? Certainly, the characters of meta-
morphosis stories tend to find themselves in untenable contradiction
in their social groups; they tend to be in a social-crisis situation. The

kind of animal or plant or heavenly body they turn into tends to define
their true relation to the rest of the universe. If it is a deep-water fish,
they become merely food for others to eat; if it is fish very near the sur-
face, they may still be nostalgic for human associations. Animals living
on, or at various levels above, the ground all have statuses in the uni-
verse, some of which are admired and prestigious.
The call of the animal tends to be 'heard' as having identifiable
meaning in the Orokaiva language, so that metamorphosed heroes
are identified, first of all, with the words their animal is thought to
speak. These words form a one-line poem, with a highly condensed
meaningful message. If transformation is into a plant, the meaningful
message has to be derived from some of the plant's features (such as
the spikes of the coco stem) or the characteristics of usable parts pro-
duced by the plant. In all these cases, the species into which the hero
is metamorphosed is known by a characteristic prestation, a message

or meaningful object, that epitomizes the relation between species
and man. Animal or bird calls occurring in myths often carry the pri-
mary explicit meaning that members of the culture derive from the
myths.
If metamorphoses transform tale characters into messages of this
kind, it would be feasible to explore whether these messages express
'organizational ideas' and, if so, whether these ideas fit a 'mathemati-
cal pattern' such as the canonic formula provides. In the next section, I
discuss the myth of the eagle and the snake, where the eagle's call ere
kogona ro (I am watching you) epitomizes the figure of the eagle (and,
by implication, of the great man) as well as a tale-function 'watchful-
ness' that (along with its orgiastic opposite) organizes the tale and sup-
plies a frame for Orokaiva sociality. That script shows that it is
Orokaiva praxis to construct societal models with the aid of messages
received from certain beings identified with human characters, on the
basis of concrete relations. And metamorphoses may be a charter oper-
ator for such identifications.
In conclusion, the function occurring in the last component of the
canonic formula is an inversion of a, an unmediating term. Metamor-
phosis into a plant or animal produces a new form that propagates. It
also produces a relation that separates. The operation of metamorpho-
sis does not suffice in itself to set up any relations of mediated
exchange, such as is undoubtedly implied in the coco/areca relation. If
such a relation is an essential part of the myth outcome (as it evidently
is here), the myth needs to explain how such a relation came about. I
return to this question below.
The transformation from a function to a term is even more familiar
to the Orokaiva as it underlies their gift-exchange system and their
habit of signifying basic sentiments like loving or intending to kill by
means of concrete messages in the form of objects publicly given or
withheld. Such signs do not necessarily state sentiments explicitly,
but - with more or less ambiguity - the public receives the message.
Sign languages, as vehicles for concrete and precise messages between
houses, are developed to a fine art.
This discussion has covered all the operations of the canonic formula
save one: Levi-Strauss's use of the exponential sign (-1). Both he and
Marcus have made its use clear from a mathematical and logical point
of view, but how do the Orokaiva use it? And are they really unable to
82 Eric Schwimmer
set up myths that do not need that exponential sign? It is not necessary,
in answering this question, to take the traditional and new variants
separately, as the same argument applies irrespective of whether the
function a, in the last component of the formula, refers to the coco or to
the areca. I shall first write out the two formulae that emerge from the
previous discussion, but without introducing the exponential sign
(-1). I shall then show that these formulae fail to describe the myth
adequately and that an adequate desciption requires a further logical
operation that may be suitably mathematized by the exponential sign
(-1). In other words, while Mosko (1991) was right in saying that this
sign provides no more than an 'additional twist/ my Orokaiva infor-
mants rejected any form of this myth from which that 'additional twist'
was absent. Moreover, they thought the 'additional twist' was an ele-
mentary point of logic and were amazed that I could not see this at
once.
The traditional variant may be read as follows, in Marcus's script:
killing (daughter): loving (father):: killing (father): coco growing

(giving nuts).
The new variant may be read as follows:
loving : killing [kambaril:: loving (BWB) : areca palm-

growing
(ZHZ) (BWB) [coconuts given] (nuts for ZHZ to
collect [kambari])
These formulae seemed to describe the stories well enough, but my

field notes of 1967 show the following questions: 'If the coco girl gave
these nuts to her lover, were the nuts themselves masculine or femi-
nine?' Answer: 'The coconuts were masculine, of course.' Question:
'How is it that a feminine palm produces masculine gifts?' Answer:
'?????' [question too absurd to answer]. After half an hour of useless
conversation, I put a new question: 'Were the nuts masculine because
they were given to a male lover?' Answer: 'Of course that was the rea-
son. Didn't you know that?'
The final twist in the logic of the myth, then, is that the gender of the
nuts was inverted so they could serve as gift objects for a person of the
opposite gender. All coconuts are destined to be given by girls to men,
therefore the nuts are masculine and all areca is destined to be given by
men to girls, therefore the nuts are feminine. The coconut is a man, the
areca is a girl.' And several proofs of this gender attribution followed.

Some years after this conversation, when Munn's and Strathern's dis-
coveries about Melanesian sociality made it clear that Melanesians
construct their self-image entirely on the basis of how significant alters
view it, I could finally see that this final twist, changing the gender of
the coconut or areca gifts, was a significant inversion. The nuts are not
just part of the palms; they go through a symbolic inversion that trans-
forms them into gift objects.
The exponential sign (-1) may of course stand for many other inver-
sions, as Levi-Strauss has shown. The one I cited above is interesting
precisely because of its elusiveness, because it is so easy for the analyst
to miss it. Levi-Strauss (1963: 225) gives theoretical reasons for believ-
ing that, in addition to the inversion between the function value and
the term value of two elements, every myth must contain one term
replaced by its opposite. His basic reasoning is that an opposition as
well as an inversion are necessary to ensure that 'a relation of equiva-
lence exists between (the initial and final) situations.' He adds an anal-
ogy: 'Freud considered that two traumas are necessary in order to
generate the individual myth in which a neurosis consists.' One may
therefore ask what reason the Orokaiva might have for their tacit rule
of setting up an inversion as well as an opposition when transforming
a myth. In the case considered here, the answer lies, once again, in their
model of sociality, which distinguishes between propagating and sepa-
rating. When the character of term a was turned into a function, as we
have seen, he became a form that propagates, standing in a relation
that - in principle - separates him radically from the girl who killed
him. The nuts he produces do not, in principle, serve any purpose
other than growing further areca palms. The same logic applies to the
coconuts.
A further logical step, turning these fruits into gift objects, is there-
fore needed to express the tale's message. The coconuts are for the
lover, the areca for the woman. Now this destination is possible only if
the gender of the fruit is the opposite of the gender of the tree. For it is
a principle of Orokaiva mediated exchange that the gift object be of the
gender of the recipient. I shall not attempt here to explain just why the
Orokaiva think so, but it is relevant to our argument that this Orokaiva
notion helps a great deal in the construction of myths conforming to
the canonic formula.
Moreover, my example is not an isolated one, as sacred knowledge,
in Melanesia, consists of interpretations, invariably partial, of signs
that reveal fragments of the state of the universe. Yet, the nature of the
84 Eric Schwimmer
universe as a whole remains unknown apart from these fragments.

Every new piece of true knowledge revealed to us makes us under-
stand in a new way what we thought we already knew. Our view of
the universe is therefore in a continuous process of transformation as
our knowledge expands. The need to transform older knowledge accu-
rately in the light of new information does lead to what Marcus would
call the mathematization of organizational ideas. It is for this reason
that Levi-Strauss's mathematization of the structures in oral cultures
remains relevant to anthropology: it reconstructs a mathematization
present already within the cultures in question.
4. The Typological Aspect of the Mythic Mode and the

Canonical Formula
Levi-Strauss (1963: 225) admits that his formula is an approximate for-

mulation, but he never changed it. Marcus suggests a formal change,
but he does not raise the question of how the formula tells us that the
contradiction expressed in the second segment is necessarily weaker
than the one expressed in the first segment. Yet mythic structure, as
well as the mythic mode, seem to depend on this weakening of the
contradiction. This weakening seems to inhere in the total system of
relations of the second segment, not necessarily in any part of it. One
may well ask whether (and if so how) it can be expressed in any 'math-
ematical pattern/
In both variants of the text considered, the weakening is most
strongly visible in the symbol y, which in the first segment stands for
the functions loving or killing, the Orokaiva verbs being used in their
strongest, absolute sense. In the second segment, however, the terms
they stand for are weakened by metonymy: they are things given,
things collected, things of which in principle an indefinite quantity is
always available. Even though one may describe the symbol as 'stand-
ing for' the same word, that word is used in a 'weaker' meaning. The
things obtained, while more attainable than those sought in the first
segment, also have the quality of being attainable at a more bearable
level of danger. Yet this visible weakening in the symbol y is evidently
linked to weaker values given to the three other symbols.
The simplest way to mathematize this phenomenon would be to
return to the interpretation of the operator ::, with which Marcus made
great progress. In addition to expressing the syntagmatic progression
from the first to the second paradigm, this immensely polysemic sign
seems also to signal that the second paradigm transforms the unbear-
ably great into a tolerably diminished contradiction. It may even be
that diminution is the primary meaning of the operator in question. If
so, many interesting implications suggest themselves. One of them
is to be found in Levi-Strauss's own writings, when he suggests that
'the question arises whether the small-scale model or miniature ... may
not in fact be the universal type of the work of art... The paintings of
the Sistine Chapel are a small-scale model in spite of their imposing
dimensions, since the theme which they depict is the End of Time'
(1966: 23).
One may certainly say the same of many large Melanesian ritual par-
aphernalia, which are nonetheless miniatures of spirit entities imag-
ined to be much larger still. In the first segment of an Orokaiva myth,
the narrator evokes something close to a familiar village setting, note-
worthy only because of a happening, apparently insignificant, that
turns out to have extraordinary consequences. The first manifestation
of a spiritual entity of which most people were unaware may be a
disaster. The second segment of the myth somehow domesticates this
spirit entity, reducing the dangers it brings but keeping some of its
miraculous benefits. The structure of myth thus resembles a transfor-
mational model such as may account for the making of a reduced-size
copy or miniature. In some ways, this operation resembles Eco's (1976)
model of invention.
Starting from the perceptual stimuli of everyday village life, the tale
sets up, from its first narrative bits or 'mythemes/ what Eco calls a per-
ceptual model. By a process of abstraction or mapping, it is possible to

reduce this perceptual model to a 'semantic model/ containing - say -
two terms and two functions, hence a state of traumatic (double) con-
tradiction. The coco girl's habits can be neither controlled nor toler-
ated. At this point, Levi-Strauss introduces a transformation marked
by his mysterious sign ::, while Eco treats the solution of the problem
as an 'invention.' He argues that when an invention is made, nobody
would recognize the coded semantic model that underlies it. Thus,
when the coco girl was killed by her father/brother, nobody recog-
nized her true nature. A coded semantic model was not available until
the father/brother formally announced that the tree on the grave was a
coconut and what kind of thing a coconut is.
Eco's (1976) model as it stands is partially relevant to myth. Admit-
tedly, the father/brother was doing some 'arbitrary coding,' using an
'independent set of expressive units.' The perceptual markers of the
86 Eric Schwimmer
coco were 'mapped into an as yet unshaped (expression) continuum.'

The setting up of a myth is therefore a creative activity and the telling
of a myth reproduces that creative activity. The records of Melanesian
ethnography are full of such accounts of discovery and invention.
Myths do not only report creations; they also say what creation is. Yet,
once this creative genesis of the myth is forgotten, as it always is
sooner or later, mythic structure and mythic thought may still survive,
even if people have stopped expressing it in a narrative in the mythic
mode (see Schwimmer 1976: 16, 1996: 15-38; Williams 1928: 204-5). It
has then become part of a code and is no longer part of 'art.' For this
reason, Eco's 'open' model of invention needs supplementing with
Levi-Strauss's more general 'closed' model of myth.
The miniaturising operator that appears in the canonic formula is in
fact a familiar feature of Melanesian religion and perhaps all non-
metaphysical religions. The kind of double-bind situation set up by the
coco girl is characteristic of spirit intrusion in general. Breaking out of
the double bind takes great 'spiritual' energy on the part of human
actors, for killing is a way out of the double bind. In the variant where
the coco girl is the heroine, it is by being killed that she becomes one, as
often happens in Orokaiva tales. Thus, the man whose name is remem-
bered as ancestor of the earth oven is not that of the killer, but of the
first victim who created the oven by being cooked in it. It is at any rate
by this killing that coco and areca were put in man's service, ritually
and nutritionally.
Another way of regarding miniaturization is (as Levi-Strauss sug-
gested) the humanization of nature and the naturization of human

relations. Whether these two processes should be equated to the dyad
magic/religion is another question. The myth under consideration
illustrates both processes. The act of giving a girl in marriage to
another house is 'naturized,' the coco and areca are 'humanized.' The
passage between the realms of man/nature, difficult to envisage for
Occidentals, is attainable to the enlightened in the Orokaiva system,
where nature and man are conceived as connatural. Though penetra-
ble, the boundary is nonetheless always difficult to cross, nature being
immense in principle while man is smaller. Is man a miniature of
nature?
In any case, Levi-Strauss's own description of miniaturization (1966)
certainly describes that process as containing an opposition (event/
object) and an inversion (whole/part), so that it seems just another
instance - but perhaps the principle - of the canonic formula. If this
suggestion is acceptable, the vast implications of the canonic principle

become more evident.
Once we enlarge the scope of the canonic equation along lines like those
suggested above, it becomes possible to consider more seriously its
relation to what Northrop Frye called the 'mythic mode.' If the mythic
operator serves to 'miniaturize' nature, then the enunciator of myth, the
sacred bard, may well be regarded as the master of the mythic game.
The brother of the coco girl would be a fit prototype of such a sacred
bard. Yet, a great many Orokaiva tales do not contain charter-enunciat-
ing bards, nor are they told under anything like bardic conditions. They
are, indeed, often the topic of after-dinner conversation. But what-
ever the setting may be, certain oral performances are believed very
strongly, as though they were indeed bardic pronouncements. More-
over, for the Orokaiva corpus that Iteanu and I collected, classifying the
tales according to Frye's criterion would be meaningless.
The Orokaiva have their own way of classifying their oral literature
(see Iteanu and Schwimmer 1996). They distinguish three types of
tales, but this distinction appears to apply primarily to types of knowl-
edge. It may, but need not, apply in addition to differences in forms of
expression. The siririmbari are ancestor legends of war, migration, and
settlement, the o ihi relate events that contribute to establishing the
social world and the cosmos, while the third type may be called anec-
dotes, a genre for which various terms are used in different villages -
ke isapa in Sivepe, o ohu in and around Jajao. The first two types are
accepted as veridical, if told by the 'owner' of the tale, while the third
type is primarily valued as entertainment. Yet, there are subtle shad-
ings in these distinctions that are never absolute.
Most of the great myths, in the Western sense of the word, would
belong to the o ihi type and, as such, would be deficient if certain items
of knowledge were not mentioned in the tale, in conformity with the
tradition of the house. Mythic themes may occur at times in the histor-
ical legends. The anecdotes are never authoritative statements about
the history of sociability or the cosmos. They are usually much more
light-hearted. They may, however, have 'mythical' qualities - in
thought, in mode, and even in structure - either when the theme is
mythical but the narrator is not a veridical source, or when a non-
mythical theme is treated by a narrator deeply imbued with the mythi-
cal mode of oral literature, so that his mythical attitude tends to
emerge irrespective of the theme he happens to treat.
88 Eric Schwimmer
My purpose in exploring the mythicality of these anecdotes is to

show that mythic thought, mythic structure, and the mythical mode
are not just attached to particular tales but pervade content and form
in ways that might easily go unrecognized. While it is not hard to point
at particular modern artworks that are mythic in mode and even in
structure, these are still marginal, whereas the 'low mimetic' mode
remains dominant. In establishing the dominance of a mode, it does
not suffice to look at some of the great pinnacles of the literary or other
arts; the habits of popular culture are at least as significant. In Oro-
kaiva literature, these habits are most clearly visible in the anecdote
genre.
The narrator of 'The Boa Story' (Iteanu and Schwimmer 1996) was
Michael Kione Jiroga of Sivepe, an old man thought to be slightly
senile, whose tales, though always amusing and well told, carried no
authority as sources of serious knowledge. The boa story was one of
the few tales in the Orokaiva corpus where the main characters were
animals: an eagle and a boa constrictor. The eagle had found himself a
wife by picking up (literally, with his beak) a beautiful girl who was
bathing and carrying her to the top of his tree. There, he furnished her
with all comforts and she had a baby. She decided to make a journey
home, and the eagle decided this was the moment to formalize his
marriage. He sent her off with a suitable gift of meat. But she decided
to take 'the low road' rather than 'the high road/ and was waylaid by
the snake, who then considered himself to be her husband. When girl,
eagle, and snake arrived at the girl's village, the eagle attacked the boa
as it was sunning himself on the roof beams of the patio. The snake
was killed and became part of the bridal feast. Old Michael had fun
describing how the eagle, as a dutiful son-in-law, brought in the fire-
wood on which his rival was roasted.
Even in the first sentence, we find evidence of 'mythical thought/
since a Westerner (devotee of the 'low mimetic' mode) would normally
title this 'The eagle and the snake'; but to Michael it was 'The Snake's
Story' - the boa being the hero, as it was the boa who died. This rule,
that the one who dies is normally the hero, is an Orokaiva literary con-
vention that is characteristic of the mythic mode, where the remem-
bered spirits of the dead reign supreme. Furthermore, the story evokes
some mythic cosmic oppositions: high/low, dry/wet, hot/cold, setting
up symbolic domains for the two protagonists, eagle and snake. In the
story, the high-dry-hot principle represented by the eagle is victorious
because - although the boa constrictor is endowed with greater muscle
power - the eagle has a commanding power of constant vision, knowl-

edge, and control.
Woman is situated midway between the two principles. Her humid-
ity makes her vulnerable, especially during her menses, when she is a
great potential danger to the community. It is by being bonded to a
strong and watchful male that she can turn the watery part of her
nature to full account by her special gift of fertility. Yet, oddly enough,
this dominance of mythic thought does not guarantee that the tale is a
'myth' in Levi-Strauss's sense. Most literary historians who wrote
about myth (Frye 1957,1978,1990; Meletinsky 1989; Lotman 1990, etc.)
think that myths are timeless and cyclical, that they are stories that
repeat themselves endlessly. Levi-Strauss, however, describes mythic
structure as 'helicoid/ assuming that something irreversible happens
in a myth. So one may well ask, Was the death of the snake irrevers-
ible? Is it assumed that after dying the snake is simply reborn, ready to
re-enact his drama once more, like Demeter and Persephone?
The story says simply that Taha dies, is eaten, is finished. Orokaiva
have many Taha stories, in most of which the boa is a powerful god,
destroying those who slight him. Are these two notions in contradic-
tion? But why should they be? Because gods are immortal? But who
says so? The Tahitians do not believe gods are immortal (Valeri 1985),
nor do the Orokaiva. If a spirit entity inhabits a material form, and if
that material form is killed, the Orokaiva believe the spirit entity is
killed also. They do not say it ceases to exist, because they do not think
an object ceases to exist when it is killed. Once dead, it is still there. It
can be dangerous, which is the case with Taha.

But if so, what does such death mean? Was Taha any different when
he was still 'alive'? This question is crucial if we are to decide whether
the Taha story fits the Frye-Lotman model or the Levi-Strauss model.
According to Michael's tale, when Taha was alive, he courted women,
he chewed betelnut with them, he visited his prospective parents-in-
law. He no longer does so today. For today, as we know, he just kills
any unwary traveller, male or female, that crosses his path. He has
become an irreconcilable enemy. His nature has changed, in the same
way as another Orokaiva tale says the wild boar changed its nature,
after he married a human girl, maltreated her, and was killed after-
wards (Iteanu and Schwimmer 1996).
From this angle, then, Michael's story is not fully cyclical. Yet it does
not formally fit the canonic formula, for Michael's text does not say
explicitly that Taha's nature has changed, nor how it has changed.
90 Eric Schwimmer
Would the average Orokaiva listener to this tale think it is cyclical or

would he think it marks a transformation in the relations between man
and snake? There are reasons to believe that, to the Orokaiva, Taha's
death marks a profound transformation. For many other Orokaiva sto-
ries are similarly concerned with the transition from a primal state to a
very different state of the world of today. This new state began when
people discovered what is now called 'custom': marriage, fire, bound-
aries maintained by warfare, including the boundaries separating
human and animal society. Women no longer marry snakes or even
eagles.
Every reference to this transition from a primal to the actual state of
the world is part of 'mythic thought.' Most artworks representing this
transition are in the 'mythic mode.' But they do not necessarily, in any
formal sense, have 'mythic structure.' They could be made consistent
with the canonic formula only if the analyst supplied the missing
parts, a procedure open to obvious objections. On the other hand, 'The
pig who married a girl' (Iteanu and Schwimmer 1996), which is analys-
able by the canonic formula, shows a full example of such a transition.
It would be predictable only by an analyst with perfect knowledge of
Orokaiva ethno-zoology.
But even that text is elliptical when it comes to describing the
present state of the world that came into being after the pig was killed.
This is not an accident. The ohihi genre (as its name indicates) deals
with what happened long ago; it does not deal with what happens
today. The coco girl's story is different because, once the transforma-
tion from the primal to the present state of the world was made, recent
political history of the hill and coastal tribes was mythified. But the fact
is that the Orokaiva no longer completely mythify the world in which
they live. They mythify only part of it. I am not even sure whether
there ever was a time when they mythified the whole of it. Yet I am far
from thinking that in any foreseeable future they will stop mythifying
at least part of it. This is what the final section of this paper will try to
establish.
The 'detached vagina' (Iteanu and Schwimmer 1996) is much less like a
myth, and more anecdotal than the other stories of Samuel Jovareka
that we recorded. It is about a man who never stopped fornicating with
his wife, even when he took her out ostensibly for fishing. He withheld
the fishing net from her when she asked for it, but she constantly had
to give him her vagina. At last she asked her husband formally to let
her have the net as he promised. When he asked for more sex first, she
picked up a somberu fruit, put it inside her skirt, then let it drop at a
fork in the river. 'Husband/ she said, 'your thing has dropped down.'
Late at night, he was still fishing for his wife's vagina in the river. His
wife found him there, asleep in the water.
His wife took him back home and dropped her sewing needle
through the floorboards. This was a needle of flying-fox bone, pointed,
phallic in shape. Her husband had brought this poma home for her
from hunting. She asked him to look for it under the floor (floors of
Orokaiva houses are about five feet above ground level) and then pass
it up to her through the gap in the boards. As he did so, he saw that his
wife's vagina was just where it always used to be. His wife said she
had recovered it by the riverside.
This is an anecdote, not a myth. It is almost a tit-for-tat story, except
that the wife is very generous and forgiving. It certainly contains noth-
ing miraculous; it might be classed as a humorous sketch of domestic
life. Mythic thought is present only diffusely, in the husband's credu-
lity and the ritual value of objects like needles. Yet, it does have mythic
structure. If one refers to the canonic formula it becomes clear how the
event transforms conjugal relationships and reduces the husband's
unlimited sexual needs to a bearable level. Let us say the terms a,b
stand for husband and wife respectively. Let functions x and y stand
for withholding and giving. The first segment of the formula then
expresses the argument the couple had about copulation and the net.
The third component of the formula says the wife withheld her vagina,
by dropping it into the river. What she did drop in the river was a som-
beru fruit, similar in shape to a vagina, and not eaten by humans but by
cassowaries. The Orokaiva word a means both 'woman' and 'vagina,'
so that the second and third component have the same term.
The second segment of the equation focuses on two objects that may
be regarded either as artefacts or as body parts that have become
detached. One is the vagina - regarded as a gift made by the woman to
the man, hence a masculine gift presented by a woman. It is repre-
sented here ironically as detachable in the same way as a coconut is
detachable from a coco palm. The other object is the poma that may be
thought of as a phallus, detached from a masculine body for sewing,
and hence a feminine gift. Thus, the formula's final component has the
term 'gift' and the function 'detaching of the penis.' The exponential
function (-1) would refer, once more, to the inversion from the gender
of the producer to the gender of the gift.
92 Eric Schwimmer
In brief, without being a myth this tale has mythic structure. More-
over, it is in the 'mythic mode/ The story of the detached vagina
resembles others where the Orokaiva preach the dangers of being
blinded by excessive desire and the virtues of restraint and prudence.
These stories do not end tragically, but they transform a situation,
reducing excessive hopes to the constraints of a livable universe. The
diffuse presence of mythical thought, in some ways carrying 'post-
modern' overtones, is evident in the references to detached body parts.
The self is presented here as a 'dividual' (Marriott 1977, Strathern 1988,
Schwimmer 1990), of which each part is activated only by relations
with significant others. Here an object in A's possession (a vagina, a
penis) may be said to 'belong to' B if it is destined as a gift to B. In this
tale, the man says 'my vagina/ while the woman says 'your vagina.'
The object is thus presented linguistically as detachable. On the other
hand, the poma is attachable to the male body only symbolically,
linguistically.
As the theme of this discussion is the canonic formula, I have so far, as

much as possible, treated myths as systems of abstract relations. Levi-
Strauss is very much aware that they are also objects of aesthetic con-
templation. Yet, for the purpose of his explorations of the logic of
myths, he needed to ignore all aspects of their narrativity. Exegesis was
not his principal end either. If we choose to adapt his method to pur-
poses of ethnographic analysis, we can perhaps not follow quite the
same procedure. From the ethnographer's point of view, myths are
part of culture. Without going as far as Malinowski, most recent analy-
ses of Melanesian ritual use myths as evidence, just as ritual facts enter
into most recent analyses of myth. The ethnographer studying myth is
unavoidably involved in interpretation.
Moreover, the texts the ethnographer studies constantly refer to the
mythic thought of the culture in question. He thus discovers that the
literary conventions of this culture adopt mythic thought as basic
tenets - as unspoken, perhaps unconscious, presuppositions. Many of
these presuppositions are, as we saw above, analogous to the canonic
formula. As these conventions are transmitted from generation to gen-
eration, literary traditions develop, having qualities identifiable as the
mythic mode.
Though this is not the place to take up literary analysis, I wonder
what kind of literary imagination would join in one tale the detached
vagina and the flying-fox bone, have the primal encounter between
man and woman mediated by a compass, invent a medicine against

adultery designed to stop lovers from pulling out, or have an angry
grandmother leave the village taking the sea with her, attached to a
leash like a dog. Such bizarre stories evidently have hidden meanings,
and those who tell them know what those meanings are. They are not
in need of Western analysts' interpretations. What, then, can be the
purpose of ethnographers using the canonical formula?
Two possibilities suggest themselves. The first would be that these
stories reveal spontaneous unconscious content, meanings of which
their creators and their own society are unaware. If so, one wonders
how they could be analysed, as most anthropological fieldworkers I
know never seem to go far beyond the learning of knowledge commu-
nicated by their hosts. Even this task is difficult enough; some of the
most successful recent Melanesian studies have been concerned almost
entirely with the task of expressing in Western languages what the
Melanesians already know. The second, probably more promising
approach would be to assume the Melanesians know what their stories
mean, but that they cannot necessarily communicate this knowledge.
There are matters of which one cannot speak, and not just because
vows taken at initiation forbid. There may have been no vows, or may
have been no need of them. But there are always words one can use to
designate, without naming, the unspeakable. The unspeakable may be
unspoken; it is not unknown. A good part of literary conventions, in
such a culture, have to do with finding ways of talking about the
unspeakable. In fact, the unspeakable is always the main topic of
mythic texts.
The canonic formula may thus be useful to the ethnographer by
helping to detect just what is the thing that cannot be said. The relation
between the detached vagina and the flying-fox bone is a good exam-
ple. As far as I know, neither this particular relation, nor the detach-
ability of body parts in general, happen to be a topic of Orokaiva
discourse, nor even of secret, initiatory discourse. There is no particu-
lar reason why this relation is unspeakable; people may begin to speak
of it in the future. At any rate, the canonic formula is the only tool I
know that will reveal this relation in the present state of knowledge. Is
this discovery useful to ethnography? Yes, demonstrably so, as the
detachability of body parts appears to be the main topic of Strathern's
book Partial Connections (1991). Discoveries of this kind are evidence
for the Melanesian construction of self-identity.
Furthermore, this example brings out the capacity of the canonic for-
94 Eric Schwimmer
mula to go beyond the confines of particular, historically defined,

modes of literature. At some stage of literary history, which the Oro-
kaiva seem to have almost reached, the mythic meaning of the flying-
fox bone may be forgotten, but it may continue to function as a literary
'image/ as symbolic of the marital relation, though people do not know
exactly why. Like the 'apple of discord' - nobody knows today whether
it comes from the story of the Trojan War or from the Book of Genesis.
This, then, is the question with which I shall conclude: I have quoted
a story that fits the mythic formula but it is not a myth. It is an anec-
dote. So the applicability of the formula is not entirely a criterion of the
'mythicality' of the tale. How, then, can we distinguish Levi-Strauss's
theory of myth from a - very interesting - theory of artistic invention?
A Kantian one, no doubt, as myths appear not to be distinguishable by
the application of the canonic formula, nor by the configuration of
Frye's mythic mode. May one apply to myth what Levi-Strauss says
about the arts in general: 'Rousseau, comme Diderot, fait eclater les
beaux-arts entre la technique et la figuration, sans voir qu'ils sont tout
entiers dans 1'espace entre les deux' (1993: 71)?
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3 Is the Canonic Formula

Useful in Cultural Description?

Claude Levi-Strauss enunciated the canonic formula in 1955. He did

far taken it up, I can contribute most usefully by just describing my

enumerated above. In the second section, I shall look at the canonical

'mythic mode.' But conversely, in cultures dominated by the mythic

1. Mythical Thought, Myth and Literature, and the Mythic Mode

Mythical thought is a domain of scientific thought. According to Levi-

Strauss. Thus, for the French reader, the word 'correspondances' is

whom apply it to any 'possible world.' The concept 'possible world/ as

Myth as a form of oral literature is usually defined by content criteria

might call a specifically mythic narrative structure.

establishing connections between apparently unhelpful bits of infor-

formula 'has to be understood diachronically.' The formula proposes

that is the very essence of myth as Levi-Strauss understands it. Though

The mythic mode is a term taken from Northrop Frye's 'Theory of

disagree because their dominant literary mode is the low mimetic,

understand Blake, Cervantes, Joyce, Beckett? Does it help us to under-

2. The Canonical Formula, the Semiosphere, and the

The primary function of the stories Levi-Strauss calls myths is cogni-

works lack a practical cognitive function, it is equally true that few

houses of his acquaintance. He would classify as sokova only such

There are three Western doctrines about connections between systems

tion between two or more individuals' - whether it be natural or artifi-

song is transformable into a guru, they begin to perform it in groups.

idicality is that the text conforms to the composer's true experience. In

indigenous or outside observer may group together corpora of tales,

Though the semiosphere as such is a synchronic concept, Lotman

cling to each version, depending on narrator, occasion, and public.

Is the canonic formula a suitable tool for modelling the invention of

functives expressed by the formula. While fully agreeing with nearly

and as 'part' of a syntagmatic 'chain.' Levi-Strauss (1991, chap. 8)

literature corpus available to a community of historical subjects forms

theory of invention, which hews closer to Hjelmslev, the two concepts

3. The Canonical Formula as a Model of Indigenous

Granted that the canonic formula as such reveals 'unconscious' struc-

tionalist rather than a doctrinaire mission follower, he interpreted Oro-

As a first step, I shall consider the variants of the coconut-girl tale,

tions in which that couple is reproduced. The coconut as mortuary gift

size that it is only in the West that male/female are regarded as

This difference in terminology is confusing and amusing, but it does

It would obviously be a grave error to regard the function of replicat-

the nuts is apt to be pricked by the spikes. The system of functions or

(in the traditional variant) by coping with the consequences of his

The unbearable contradiction leading to a moment of supreme crisis

seems to be a conventional breaking point in Orokaiva myths. The

sentation of the Orokaiva semiosphere, which tends to have two sepa-

settling of accounts between agnates and uterines/affines. It is a gift

whole) are 'mediated' in Strathern's sense: they are a sequence of direct

recognize the mathematical pattern in 'the organisational ideas that are

Function/term, term/function transformations On the basis of this myth,

in their social groups; they tend to be in a social-crisis situation. The

is metamorphosed is known by a characteristic prestation, a message

killing (daughter): loving (father):: killing (father): coco growing

The new variant may be read as follows:

loving : killing [kambaril:: loving (BWB) : areca palm-

These formulae seemed to describe the stories well enough, but my

areca is a girl.' And several proofs of this gender attribution followed.

universe as a whole remains unknown apart from these fragments.

4. The Typological Aspect of the Mythic Mode and the

Levi-Strauss (1963: 225) admits that his formula is an approximate for-

ceptual model. By a process of abstraction or mapping, it is possible to

coco were 'mapped into an as yet unshaped (expression) continuum.'