myth-and-folklore.
5 of 1538 NOTE documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| NOTE-609 | Computational challenges to Lévi-Strauss transformational methodology | Proposes DEVS modelling and simulation, in the authors’ DEVSimPy, as a way to generate and visualise Lévi-Strauss’s transformations of myth, and extends the canonical formula’s “boundary condition” to a programme on identity politics. What it shows is software: myths as mytheme lists, variants produced by user-specified operations, and one Corsican folktale’s mythemes placed on Google Earth. No claim about myth is tested. | Read |
| NOTE-615 v2 | Морфология сказки | Finds that in a hundred Russian wondertales the stable units are characters’ functions, defined by their consequence for the action: 31 of them, in one order, over seven spheres of action, so every wondertale is a selection from one sequence and the variety lies in omissions, realisations and the casting of characters. Plot and variant cannot be separated, tales can be generated from the scheme, and the wondertale is conjectured to be morphologically a myth. | Read |
| NOTE-632 | Discrete-event simulation of Lévi-Strauss’s myth analysis | Specifies the DEVS models behind the authors’ Lévi-Strauss simulation. A myth is a list of (term, function) mythemes; homology, inversion, opposition and symmetry are each the replacement of one term by a user-supplied other in every mytheme; mythemes can be added or removed; the canonical formula is described but not given a computation. Reproducing 70 Mythologiques myths and 28 Corsican tales by transformations chosen to produce them is offered as validation of Lévi-Strauss’s method; it shows only that the encoding can express them. | Read |
| NOTE-641 | Transformation transformed | Separates structuralism’s method from Lévi-Strauss’s doctrine and makes transformation its core: a structure is the set of invariant relations that orders passage between variants. Lévi-Strauss transformed in two regimes, Goethean development of an initial form (kinship) and Thompsonian deformation between given forms (myth, where the analyst cuts the continuum); Descola’s four ontologies are a Goethean group, and structural comparison the fairest symmetrization anthropology has. | Read |
| NOTE-642 | Morphology of the Folktale | In chs. II–III of the 1968 English text, Propp’s four theses and his 31 functions appear as in the Russian. The functions are named by nouns of action under capitalised headings, with Greek signs for the seven preparatory functions and Latin ones after. “Dramatis personae” and “characters” alternate for the same word, and the class studied is “fairy tales”, under a title Dundes calls misleading. The second edition’s additions are visible on the page: Wagner’s notes correct about forty of Propp’s tale references in two chapters and renumber the tales to the later Afanas’ev numbering. | Skimmed |