This book, by Ivan Strenski (Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of California, Riverside) is comprised of ten chapters with the first chapter serving as an introduction. In the introduction, the author relates that this manuscript stems from a “collection of essays spanning thirty-odd years” (14), and he relates his own entry point, a historical quest to find the intellectual origins of Lévi-Strauss’s approach to myths.
Of the remaining chapters, chapters 2 through 6 and chapter 9 hold together in a mostly cohesive fashion towards answering this question. In addition, chapters 7, 8, and 10 take the work in a very different direction, towards the author’s own “performative theory” of myth, largely derived from the theories covered in the first chapters of the book.
All chapters seem to have been completed independently, as there is a fair amount of overlap and repetition, but the majority (2-6, 9) mostly focus on the same topic: a historical account of Continental (mostly French) mythologists of the late 1800s and early 1900s. German scholars are included in the periphery, and there are just a couple bare mentions of English scholars (Frazer, but not Tylor). This is a work largely on mythologists rather than mythologies, centering on Lévi-Strauss and radiating out in all directions. The fine detail of historical inquiry almost turns gossipy at times, as when the author queries repeatedly why Lévi-Strauss didn’t ever make a telephone call to Mauss, given that they lived in the same city and had publicly listed numbers. Political disagreements, funding difficulties, and scholastic infighting make up most of this tale. Most of the characters here are the well-known dramatis personae—Mauss, Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss, Durkheim, Dumézil, Malinowski, etc. —although Strenski does consistently champion a relatively minor character, Hubert, who he sees as enormously influential, even though publishing very little, and dying fairly young. Hubert is clearly the hero of this story (chapter 9 is entitled “Henri Hubert Undoes Aryanist Political Myths”) and it is clear that Strenski sees Hubert as the primary answer to his long-ago quest.
The remaining chapters enter an entirely different project from the first majority of the book, proposing a performative theory of myths. The author’s theory seems to stem directly from the internecine debates of the early 1900s’ Parisian circle of scholars yet is applied as a “new theory” to contemporary, or nearly contemporary, affairs. There is a rather obvious and very large lacuna here: nearly all the mythic scholarship that has occurred since the early 1900s, and outside of Parisian scholarly cliques.
In this work there is absolutely nothing from North American mythology, or Japanese mythology, of Hindu mythology, or Australian mythology, and nothing from any of the extensive twentieth and twenty-first century scholarship emanating from intensive fieldwork and in-depth cultural participation, language training, and emic awarenesses in ethnographic case studies all over the world. Nor are any scholars of these mentioned. No Dell Hymes, for example, former president of the American Anthropological Association, the Linguistic Society of America, and the American Folklore Society, who broke through with his famous “breakthrough into performance” analysis of his Native American mythic interlocuters. Again: these are not mentioned, and there is no awareness of them displayed in this book. There is nothing on performance studies as a widespread field of enquiry.[1] The author repeatedly makes grand pronouncements that have already been suggested, debated, revised, rejected and/or accepted over the last one hundred years of scholarship.
In chapter 8, the only chapter to engage with near-contemporary mythologists, he engages primarily with Joseph Campbell, Jonathan Z. Smith (the historian of religion whose work he dismisses as “absurd”), and Robert Segal. The book is dedicated to Robert Segal in memory of “a lifetime of collegiality,” but the author consistently misrepresents Segal’s work. For example, Strenski claims that Segal “advertises his affinities” (164) for the work of Joseph Campbell, and that Campbell was one of Segal’s favorite theorists (18). A section title is “Segal’s ‘Garden-Variety’ Jungism.” All of these attributions are uninformed by Segal’s published pieces denouncing Campbell’s claims, and the entire Jungian approach.[2] The author meanwhile repeatedly draws on and praises Campbell’s work, seemingly unaware of the rejection of these theories from the scholarly realm of contemporary mythologists.
There is a rather large problem when theories and ideas from over a hundred years ago are applied to contemporary times and issues, particularly without much reference to the accepted scholarship since then. The “performance” theory of myth is already well-established in the discipline, but it bears little resemblance to the superorganic idea put forward in this book. The author’s “performative theory” of myth, uneducated by such research, is presented as novel, as new, as profound. Unfortunately, read in the context of contemporary scholarship, it comes across instead as remarkably uninformed, outdated, and (probably as a result of these), rather colonial.
The author’s main idea is that myths, themselves, perform. They are agents: they perform, they act, they themselves do things (see, e.g., pages 1, 4, 148). This is rather divergent from the currently accepted scholarly understanding of performance: that the story does not act, but humans do. As put in Thompson and Schrempp, “Myths do not ‘explain’ the cosmos, or ‘do’ anything at all: people, and only people, enact myths, perform myths, and do things with myths.”[3] This contains the core idea of performance: it’s not about myths, but about humans who perform them.
The title, then, is an unfortunate testament to what happens when scholarship from a past century is applied uncritically to contemporary times, without any seeming awareness of much of the scholarship in the last one hundred years. It would be a bit like describing the atom as the smallest material in the universe and then proposing a theory of “intelligent particles” that make up the atom. When the author complains that myth is marked by a “history of ramshackle scholarship” (138) I can only sense a deep irony: perspicuity of punctilious historical inquiry does not translate easily into contemporary scholarship, and in this manner Strenski’s work presents an excellent cautionary tale.
In addition to the main text, there is a bibliography which I found woefully incomplete (for example, in spite of many discussions of Campbell, there is no bibliographic entry), and an index which I found often incorrect.
Notes
[1] For an excellent overview of the history of performance studies and folklore, see Emerging Perspectives in the Study of Folklore and Performance, edited by Solimar Otero and Anthony Bak Buccitelli (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2025).
[2] See, e.g., Robert A. Segal’s article precisely on the topic: “Joseph Campbell’s Theory of Myth,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 44 (1978) 91-114.
[3] Tok Thompson and Gregory Schrempp, The Truth of Myth: World Mythology in Theory and Everyday Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), p. 5.
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[Review length: 1133 words * Review posted on December 19, 2025]