MASTER PROJECT AUTUMN 1-research
What is the function of a folk story/myth ? how are modern folk stories created? are they the popular stories that keep coming back (and therefore get remembered and passed on?)- FROM THE NATURE AND FUNCTION OF MYTH. E.O JAMES
- The essential function of myth is to validate and justify, conserve and safeguard the fundamental realities and values, customs and beliefs on which depend the stability and continuance of a given way of life.
- Myth and ritual function to promote social intercourse and security, to maintain and establish tradition as a living reality within the milieu of primaeval tradition as a consolidating dynamic.
- By grounding the established order in a mythological supernatural reality stability is given to the socials structure and religious organisation, and a scared authority is provided for the things done and believed.
- The function of myth in short is to stabilize the existing regime, to afford infallible precedents for practice and procedure, and to place on an unassailable foundation the general rules of conduct, traditional institutions and the sentiments controlling social behaviour and religious belief.
- The seasonal sequence of ploughing, seedtime and harvest, of lambing and shearing, together with the crises of the human cycle of birth, marriage and death, were integral elements in their everyday life and its occurrences constituting their essential culture and determining their way of life, thought and behaviour.
TO DO :
check for more recent sources, this one dates from 1957 and even if some of it can still be valid/credible I don’t like the way they write (primitive societies etc...)