David Graeber’s work is often described as ‘myth-busting’. His most recent scholarly work with David Wengrow is explicitly so – a weeding out (excuse the farming pun) of many of the most entrenched Enlightenment myths about human history and the origins of social inequality. But what makes his way of myth-busting particularly compelling is that it is informed by a theory of myth itself – of what myth is, what it does, and how it stands in relation to human creativity and social transformation. The study of myth, for Graeber, was not an arbitrary indulgence. It was central to his overall take on the scope of anthropology. For him, anthropology was most valuable as a comparative inquiry into human possibilities – one that throws our own contemporary myths into sharp relief, thereby revealing our own creative potential and possibilities for social transformation.

Though Graeber never published specifically on myth, the theme emerges in a variety of guises throughout his work: in the Value book (2001), in the essays collected in Possibilities (2007), and of course in The Dawn of Everything (2021). He often taught courses on myth and ritual. Before his death, he had prepared a series of lectures focused on Gregory Bateson’s Naven mythic and ritual complex. Most importantly, in 2017 he wrote a long foreword to Terry Turner’s The Fire of the Jaguar (2017), a detailed structural analysis of the Kayapo myth on the origin of cooking fire. We learn from this not only the value that Graeber saw in the anthropological study of myth, but also the huge influence that Turner had on his thinking. Turner was for Graeber what Graeber is for many of us, someone with “a remarkable ability to make … (still extremely complicated) ideas sound like matter-of-fact common sense, and even to render them fairly straightforward.” (Graeber 2017:xxi). Graeber lamented that what Terry Turner could do in person in no way corresponded to his written work. He admitted that, initially, he could not understand a word of it. Once he understood it, however, he came to regard Turner as “the most underrated social theorist of the last 50 years” (pers. comm.) and The Fire of the Jaguar “one of the greatest achievements of anthropological theory, […] that should deserve a place among the classics” (ibid:xxxix).

Given Graeber’s political life, his interest in myth seems surprising. In a pedigree that goes from Mircea Eliade to Jordan Peterson, the study of myth has traditionally been the province of the politically conservative. Though approaches to the subject vary widely, for the great majority of theorists, myths either reflect archetypal structures of the human mind or resolve contradictions related to individual experience. They have no direct relationship to social organisation, let alone social transformation. What Graeber saw in Turner was quite the opposite: a rare progressive theory of myth, where the latter emerges as the embodiment, if not as the paragon, of human social creativity. In what follows, we examine these connections, we show how this argument originates from a radical rethinking of structuralism, and we consider how it came to fashion Graeber’s way of doing anthropology.

First, though, a few words on The Fire of the Jaguar.

Myth, action and dynamic structuralism

The Fire of the Jaguar is the most prominent myth of the Kayapo, an Amazonian group whom Terry Turner researched for over fifty years. The myth recounts the story of a young boy who is adopted by jaguars, who then teach him how to use cooking fire – knowledge that he brings back to the Kayapo community. In essence, the myth explains how Kayapo attain full sociality out of nature, a process that is reflected both in the maturation of the boy and in the manipulation and replication of fire.

To our knowledge, Turner’s analysis of this myth is the most detailed analysis of a single myth in the anthropological literature. It is structuralist in character but very different (and, in Graeber’s view, more compelling) than the structuralism of Lévi-Strauss. Turner embeds his analysis of myth in Kayapo socioeconomic organisation (which he knew very well) and is not concerned with comparing it with other myths to reveal an underlying code. He suggests instead that the maturation of the boy in the myth reveals a model not only for the socialisation of youth but also for the consolidation of Kayapo society as a whole. In Kayapo matriuxorilocal communities, men must undergo an emotionally disruptive process of detachment as they move from their natal home to the communal men-house, and finally to the house of their in-laws. By recounting parallel processes of detachment, the myth of the fire of the jaguar reframes the tensions and contradictions of this experience. Myth thus functions as an important means whereby societies are able to shape behaviour into collectively prescribed organizational patterns. Ultimately, Turner argues that Kayapo myth and social organisation stand in a relation of circular causality with one another, i.e., they influence each other in non-linear fashion.

He arrives at this argument by making a fundamental move away from Lévi-Strauss’ structuralism: the minimal units of myth in his analysis are not categories (types of beings or types of objects), but actions. The difference between categories and actions is that actions, when repeated, force the subject to consciously acknowledge a pattern. This is ultimately what structure is for Turner: it is a pattern of action, or, in his words, a “group of transformations bounded together by invariant constraints” (2017:207). This type of structure is always dialectic. As soon as a pattern shows change and diversification, the acting subject is forced to create a higher level of abstraction in order to account for and compare differences, which in turn can lead to yet another higher level, and so on.

Understanding what Turner means by all this requires some minimal familiarity with the concepts of ‘dynamic hierarchical system’ and ‘self-organisation’ that he takes from Piaget and cybernetics (Turner 1973) (were he to write today, Turner would probably find a more compelling treatment of these concepts in the field of complexity science (e.g., Thompson 2007 or Deacon 2012)). His adaptation of these theories into anthropology might be at times counterintuitive. For Graeber, the cross-disciplinary move he accomplishes is central. To exemplify Turner’s application of dynamic structuralism to the social domain, Graeber asks us to consider the action of feeding a child (Graeber 2017:xxxii). The moment we do this twice but with the understanding that it is the ‘same’ action we performed before, we generate, through repetition, a kind of hierarchy since there is a higher level at which those actions are both tokens of the same type. But the moment we say a different kind of repeated action is not the same – say, feeding a husband or feeding a rival at a feast – we are generating a third level, where different types are being compared. At the same time, by defining certain types of action in this way, we typically generate certain identities (child, husband, rival), kinds of person who typically perform such actions, which in turn lead us to consider, on yet a higher level of analysis, how these identities relate to one another, and so forth. Structure, in short, is always dynamic and open-ended, and always develops from lower-level actions.

Turner applies this analysis to both Kayapo social organisation and the myth of origin. The plot of the myth proceeds through a sequence of apparent tensions (e.g., a boy growing up in a matriuxorilocal society, which implies eventual separation from the natal family), which it overcomes by transposing them onto a higher level of structural differentiation of the same pattern. For instance, the detachment from the boy’s original family in the myth reflects an initial distancing from ‘nature’, which is then reproduced on a higher level in the boy’s manipulation of fire. Similarly, in Kayapo society, the actions that produce sociality at the lower level of family organisation level are structural variations of actions that produce sociality at the upper level of moieties and communal organization in the village. Overall, Turner claims to have demonstrated that, at least among the Kayapo, the dynamic structures of myth and social organisation parallel one another.

Turner’s central theoretical argument in The Fire of the Jaguar is that what we usually consider ‘mythical thought’ – the central message of the myth that is subjectively experienced by people – consists in the highest level of social self-organisation. Myth, essentially, places a cap on an otherwise ever-evolving dialectical process that would make social organisation impossible. At some point, the complexity of social reality – of why we treat one another the way we do, or why we value certain actions over others – becomes such that we are unable to form a higher level of abstraction to account for it. What myth does is pre-empting the need to construct that level, because it treats contradictions in the structure of society as playing out within the terms of that structure itself. For Turner, this also explains the reason why most myths are about the origins of social institutions: in order to avoid having to consciously create a higher level, we attribute the origin of social institutions to a mythical power in the distant past. And this is why the Kayapo, for example, regard the very power to create and maintain their social order – the fire – as originating from an extra-social source – the jaguar (see also Graeber 2020).

In sum, Turner’s structuralism makes a radical departure from Lévi-Strauss’ because 1) it takes actions, rather than ideas, as starting points. ‘Nature’ and ‘society’ are not static orders of classification but contrastive modes of actions continuously in tension with one another. 2) It takes the perspective of the subjects, rather than that of the analyst. These are tensions and processes lived by the Kayapo, which shape their values and subjectivity and the reproduction of their society. 3) It does not assume that myth simply evokes contradictions and then mediates them. This is only half of the story. The other half of the story is that myth is equally concerned with the differentiation of ambiguous situations and with their transformation; it is the end-product of a dialectical process.

On alienated consciousness and social creativity

It is challenging, of course, to give justice to the complexity of Turner’s thought on myth in the space of a few paragraphs. We hope it is clear, however, how these ideas might have had a profound influence on David Graeber: the causal significance of myth, the emphasis on action, the focus on social production, the conscious creation of structure, the very idea of a ‘dynamic structuralism’… Graeber endlessly reworked these ideas throughout his writings. The aspect we are most interested in focusing on here is that of social creativity.

Turner saw myth as the creative result of a dialectical process that enables a system of social relations. By virtue of their capacity to support different types of social organisation, the constellation of myths we find across cultures could be seen as a vast compendium of human creativity. Yet (and this is something Graeber finds particularly curious) myth is also creativity turned against itself: most of them are about how latter-day humans can’t be genuinely creative anymore. They often appear to be all about fixing either natural differences or social relations. The Kayapo myth of cooking fire is a good example of this. The creation myths of Ju|’hoan (or !Kung) speakers, among whom I (Megan Laws) did fieldwork, are another good example. They speak of a time when different beings had no fixed form, and of how (and this is significant) humans then ‘branded’ the animals with fire to give them their distinctive characteristics (Biesele 1993: 116-123) and set in place the relationships between them.

It is natural, here, for both Turner and Graeber to turn to Marx’s (1964) idea of alienation, because, so defined, myth does appear to be a form of alienated social consciousness (“we create our physical worlds, but are unaware of, and hence not in control of, the process by which we do so”, Graeber 2005: 409). As Turner puts it (2017: 202), myths seemingly present us with the “form of the natural universe”, which is “seen as self-existing prior to any particular instance of human social activity” (2017:202). We appear to be presented with the way things are, not with how they came to be. In the process, we confer power upon that which we have ourselves created. There is clearly a potential dark side to this. As Marx argues so eloquently, there is a necessary link between humans’ misunderstanding of the process of their own creativity and forms of authority and exploitation.

One of the problems in seeing things this way is that, from an anthropological perspective, one risks being condescending to people like the Kayapo. Are we really prepared to say that the Kayapo live under a form of alienated consciousness? Graeber reflects on this dilemma on several occasions, most explicitly in his criticism of the ‘ontological turn’ (Graeber 2015).

His take is twofold. Firstly, he writes, the dilemma changes as soon as we realise that we frequently criticise our colleagues’ own assumptions about the workings of society. Denying the possibility of saying that the Kayapo are wrong in their own assumptions would amount to denying their status as potential intellectual peers. But, secondly, though certainly capable of questioning the foundations of their own thought and actions, we should not assume that people like the Kayapo are questioning the foundations of their own thought and actions, or that there’s any particular reason why they should.

As Turner points out, the Kayapo “are fully conscious of constructing themselves and their society” (2017:203) through myth. We see the same awareness in the phenomenon of fetishism examined by Graeber (2005). Drawing upon ethnographic research from West Africa from the 17th to the 19th century, he writes that fetishes, from the African viewpoint, are not simply objects that are presumed to have power over us. They are objects recognised as creations, as embodiments of intentions and actions that have power over us. Likewise, the Akha people of highland Laos where I (Giulio Ongaro) did my fieldwork are known to build their villages around three features (a swing, a well, a gate) that are imbued with spiritual force. These spirits both protect and afflict Akha people with illness, but they can also be torn apart every time Akha move village. Besides, Akha know that they are the only people in their multi-ethnic region to have those features, which suggests that they are also aware that these spirits do not exist out there independent of their own minds. Like myths, these objects can embody social creativity because they have the power to establish new social relations. Yet, it would be a stretch to consider them as products of alienated consciousness because people are ultimately conscious, on some level, of the fact that their power has a human origin.

The danger comes when we take this power as natural, “when fetishism gives way to theology, the absolute assurance that the gods are real.” (Graeber, 2005:431). The assurance, in other words, that such power is immutable. Similarly, with myth, the danger comes when we elevate myth as fact. When we do so, we risk losing sight of those moments when the forms we take as natural or given are a product of the activity of human agents (and to this end, might be transformed).

In many of his writings, Graeber states that this is the condition we find ourselves in at this historical moment. We forget, as his popular line puts it, that “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently”. He and David Wengrow reflect at length on this point in The Dawn of Everything. They show how our own Enlightenment myth of origin takes the linear growth of social complexity and hierarchy as natural. If there is something peculiar about this Enlightenment myth of origin is that, unlike virtually all other origin myths, which start with a creative event (with the branding of animals or the mastery of fire), it starts with nothing and seems to negate the possibility of social creativity altogether. This brings us back to Graeber’s overall vision of anthropology and his scholarly efforts to question our own contemporary myths and their social effects.

Creative refusal

Graeber saw anthropology as a dialogic enterprise, driven by the willingness to turn to ‘others’ to challenge the value-laden assumptions – or myths – that colour our own experience of the world. He knew that anthropologists cannot take a ‘view from nowhere’, as philosopher Thomas Nagel (1989) puts it. As all social scientists, they labour under the weight of their own culturally specific assumptions. Some of Graeber’s contemporaries, most notably those aligned with the ‘Writing Culture’ turn (as well as post-structuralist and post-humanist scholars), saw this as a damning indictment of the impossibility of anthropology as an objective science (Graeber 2007b). For Graeber, it was its main strength. It is precisely by turning to ethnography, specifically to comparison, that he saw it possible to challenge our own myths, and it was in this guise that anthropology was most valuable for him.

How does the ‘dynamic structuralism’ of Graeber’s mentor, Terry Turner, fit into this? As we have examined, an important difference between the structuralism espoused by Levi-Strauss and ‘dynamic structuralism’ is that the former takes myths to have no direct link to social and material reality. The latter, to the contrary, takes myths to not only grow out of “the structure of social relations” and appeal in concrete, affective terms to those who listen to them; they are, as Turner puts it, “powerful devices for supporting a given form of social organisation” (2017:134). If we assume a relation of non-linear dynamic co-causality between myth and social organisation, then the political implications are clear: by changing one, one can change the other. Whether this circular causality between myth and social organisation is actually in place can be questioned. Graeber certainly assumes it and turns to our contemporary myths to both draw attention to their consequences, and to attack them.

Ernesto De Martino once wrote that “the task of anthropology lies in the possibility of positing problems whose solution leads to an expansion of the self-consciousness of our civilization. Only then can anthropology help the formation of a wider humanism” (De Martino 1973:3; translation from Italian original). With some reservations on the term ‘civilisation’, Graeber would surely embrace this spirit. Once he said on Twitter: “I am bored of post-humanists. I think I am a pre-humanist. Humanity is something we aspire to achieve at some point in the future”. But Graeber would also add that, though anthropology is uniquely placed to fulfil this role, the aspiration to achieve a wider humanism is by no means exclusive to the society that invented anthropology. In one way or another, it has been the primal moving force of all cultures.

This was the key point of his Marilyn Strathern lecture, where he suggested that what we call ‘cultures’ should be seen as examples of successful social movements, particularly as the outcome of a creative process of refusal (Graeber 2013). Indeed, it is not a coincidence that many ethnonyms – the names a culture gives to itself – actually mean ‘human’, suggesting perhaps that they see themselves as having achieved such status. The Dawn of Everything considerably elaborates on the argument of the Strathern lecture. Graeber and Wengrow not only engage in their own process of creative refusal – challenging enduring Enlightenment myths and their socially deleterious effects – they show the role that creative refusal and conscious social experimentation has played throughout human history. Some early criticisms of the book have contended that Graeber and Wengrow “demythologise the past” (Vernon 2021) and take our ancestors to be rational political actors who believe that “mythical narratives and religious sensitivities are inferior bases for organising society” (Shullenberger 2021). This should certainly call for an unpacking of the term ‘conscious social experimentation’. Perhaps, in and of itself, the term does evoke the idea of a group of people getting together and rationally imposing their will on the world. In light of what we have discussed in this paper, we suggest that the rubric of ‘conscious experimentation’ can – without contradictions – involve forms of myth and mythmaking. 

Giulio Ongaro is a Wenner-Gren-funded postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Anthropology at LSE and a member of the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard Medical School. He has carried out research on shamanism in highland Laos and is now writing a book on the global history of medicine.

Megan Laws is an LSE Fellow in the Department of Anthropology. She is a specialist in the anthropology of southern Africa and has conducted ethnographic research in the Kalahari Desert region. Her work has focused on egalitarianism, sharing, and kinship among Ju|’hoan speakers in Namibia.  

This text was presented at David Graeber LSE Tribute Seminar on ‘Myth and Imagination’.

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Cite as: Ongaro, Giulio and Megan Laws. 2022. “Towards a Progressive Theory of Myth: Turner and Graeber on Social Creativity.” FocaalBlog, 24 January. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/01/24/giulio-ongaro-and-megan-laws-towards-a-progressive-theory-of-myth-turner-and-graeber-on-social-creativity/