Think outside the box! Jung, Lévi-Strauss, and postcolonialism (individual, society, and institutes): spectrum of psychology and sociology

ABSTRACT

The resemblance between Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism and Carl Jung’s theory of the archetypes of the collective unconscious has been occasionally discussed. However, Lévi-Strauss followed the foundation of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, stressing the group dynamics of structural anthropology, whereas Jung’s psychology is an individual psychology. Jung employed myths as a series of images to interpret symbols of the collective unconscious, whereas Lévi-Strauss adopted theories of linguistics to analyse myths as narratives. From Lévi-Strauss’s point of view, a single cultural complex cannot be isolated from other groups of cultural complexes, as they are relational with regard to the exchange of symbols and signs. Lévi-Strauss’s comparison of the European and Native American twin mythology is a case study of the cultural complex when it is read from the perspective of Jungian psychology. How can we approach the mythology that is not one’s own culture? Do we impose our own mythology onto others’? Or do we analyse them more objectively as systems of thought? The trickster, for example, is a discourse by Western culture about Western culture, and it has a very different meaning for Native American people. With a prophetic warning to future generations, Lévi-Strauss died in 2009 – his centennial year.

KEYWORDS:

• Lévi-Strauss
• collective unconscious
• cultural complex
• twin mythology
• Native American mythology
• trickster
• colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Tatsuhiro Nakajima, PhD (Mythological Studies, Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2006) presents workshops and seminars on the topics of the ecopsychology and mythology. His research area includes Hermeticism, post-structuralism, and post-colonialism. Publications include Ecopsychology of Border Islands of Okinawa: From Isis to Biopolitics (Partridge, 2014) as well as “Psychology of the 12th Century Renaissance in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival” (Studia Hermetica Journal 8.1, 2018).

Notes

1. Derrida was critical about Lévi-Strauss’s binary opposition between culture and nature. Besides that, Derrida argued against the idea of bricolage. Philippe Descola (2009, 2005/2013) of Collège de France, a successor of Lévi-Strauss, reviewed Lévi-Strauss’s discourse on the culture/nature binary and developed his response to the argument raised by such a criticism.

2. The mythology of the two Americas is not the only one in which twinness occupies a large space. We could say as much for the myths of the entire world; Vedic India, Zoroastrian religion, the Dogon of Mali, to name a few. The Dogon’s twin mythology meshes well with Africa as a whole (Lévi-Strauss, 1991/1995b, p. 225).