I write this surrounded by stacks of boxes and heaps of papers. Our office, the Japanese Studies Program, is moving with the rest of the departments to this spanking elegant structure of a building. We are leaving this white building that is set up like a paradigm shift and into the clean lines of the new Social Science Building. It is as if the new home for those disciplines that do the social scientific argue for the cleansing of our minds so that new frameworks, new perspectives can be developed. For that is really the work of those who are of the social sciences, to form and forge new and different ways of looking at things, not because change is always correct but that the world is forever changing and we can cope only if we are given the portals of vision that can accommodate the changes.
Change does good things. When you start throwing things up and out, you are bound to meet up with old papers. The dustbin is not only for dust and allergens; they are also for the irascible memories. I can almost see Foucault’s beginning: it was not in the mind that he discovered the value of reading the stratigraphic layers but in the old things he had to recover if only to explain the present.
My own archaeological excavation these past weeks has yielded treasures, among them the monographs written by the French Structuralist Claude Levi-Strauss. Structuralism is an old theory: it proceeds from the tenet that the human brain is binary in nature. This has afforded scholars miles and miles of space to explore about the polarities of realities in our live. These dichotomies have values: white is positive while black is negative; life is good but death is bad, and so on. If you follow the logic of structuralism, you end up sometimes in sterile antonyms, without meaning and, removed from their cultural bases, become absurd points in space. Used well, structuralism is the camera one needs to document myths, folklore, and other literary forms.
I must admit I used to be obsessed with French Structuralism. Like their films, French theories about anything are as delicious as they are confounding. The late chanson artist Charles Aznavour used to say that for the French, they can talk about their armpits and turn the topic into a song or a lament.
In my case, the artifacts documenting that obsession are now before me. Mythologiques or The Logic of the Myth, the cerebral exercise that is the Structural Study of the Myth, and the lambent travel into the primitive past, Tristes Tropiques, translated always as Ah! Sad Tropics. What I like about this anthropologist is how he marvels at the power of observation. In Tristes Tropiques, he says: I have learned since then what a useful training in observation such short glimpses of a town, an area or a culture can provide and how… one may even grasp certain features which, in other circumstances, might have long remained hidden…
If there is something though that compels me to go back to Levi-Strauss it is his idea about myths. For him, myths from different parts of the world resemble each other through structures. Their contents may change, but their structures remain the same.
If the Bikol epic sounds and feels like the Homeric tales, then structuralism is that foundation upon which the church of Ibalon is founded. Still, Claude Levi-Strauss is marvelous in that he proposes that myth is language, because myth has to be told in order to exist.
If the story of Handiong and Baltog and the land of Ibalon is to be told, what do we talk about them?
Structuralism does not stop here, however, for Levi-Strauss borrows from Saussure and his theory about languages. From this linguistic standpoint, Levi-Strauss stresses that myths are historical (they belong to a particular time and space) and ahistorical (meaning that the story via structure is timeless).
Faked or invented or reinvented or reworked, the myth is good because it can be timeless. To keep it as a valid myth, there is no need to be all worked out about the storyteller. In a sense, Levi-Strauss guides us to be our own Kadugnung: our own storyteller.
The field is open. Let us tell the tales of this land now.
