Creating Mythology

Myth (Coupe 1997, Doty 2000) and ritual have been consistently used as paradigms to analyze the use of cultural storytelling. Theories of intertextuality (Kristeva 1980) and narrative identity (Ricoeur 1988) assist in the development of a more cogent theory of myth.

Elizabeth Bird is critical of “universalising” text-bound approaches to myth. She argues for an anthropological understanding of myth “more as process than text and as a joint product of storyteller and audience.” (2003). Bird argues the need for multi-site ethnographic audience studies, which would attempt to conceptualise and understand the emergence of broad intertextual “mediascapes”. However she also argues that more traditional text-based studies can play a part in this project if they pursue a “thick” description, which looks towards the place of the text in everyday life.

While Barthes’ (1972) ideological perspective on myth is an instructive counterpoint, as Coupe (1997) has pointed out, though witty and original, his essential point: that bourgeois ideology sets itself up – through a range of cultural forms – as natural rather than constructed, is impressively made but is ultimately a form of “demythologisation propounding its own myth of mythlessness” (Coupe 1997). The collapse of myth into ideology not only forecloses any sense of dynamism that the concept might hold but also forecloses on the very term itself as a viable independent analytic concept.

In his exhaustive study of different approaches to myth in fields as diverse as anthropology, theology, literary studies and cultural studies, Doty warns that “myth is a term with no singular historical usage; (2000). He argues for a “complex field definition” or a “definitional matrix” that “recognizes mythic multidimensionality in both origination and application” (2000).

Native American Church [NAC]

Many Native tribes across the Americas participate in the ceremony of communal prayer and spirit flight/consciousness expansion known as the Native American Church [NAC] ceremony. The NAC is an Indian tradition amongst tribes extending from South American to Alaska which has been practiced for centuries.
[Chip Thomas]

Within this religious healing tradition of the NAC, medicine meetings are held for patients who are suffering mentally and/or physically. Community plays a central, primary role in a process of NAC ritual, in which diagnosis is not merely a prescriptive rite that passively initiates the therapeutic, but that it can itself constitute a cure. Viewing the NAC ritual as a "talking cure" and an example of "narrativizing" illness (something it shares with Western psychotherapy) manifests against the backdrop of Navajo beliefs about thought, speech, and health, within the context of a medicine meeting, its healers, patients and church members.

Brasil's Syncretic Religions

Syncretic religions such as Candomblé have millions of followers, mainly Afro-Brazilians. They are concentrated mainly in large urban centers in the Northeast, such as Salvador (Bahia), Recife, or Rio de Janeiro in the Southeast. The capitals of São Paulo, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina have a great number of followers too, but in the South of Brazil the most common African influenced Ritual is Almas e Angola, which is an Umbanda-like religion [that blends Catholicism, and Kardecist Spiritualism – 19th century mediumistic based phenomena], and Afro-Brazilian religions ritual. Nowadays in Santa Catarina's capital there are over 70 "Terreiros", which are the places where the rituals run. There's still lots of prejudice about "African cults" in Brazil's south, but there are lots of Catholics, Protestants and other kinds of Christians who also believe in the Orishas, so they use to go both to Churches and Terreiros.

Candomblé, Batuque, Xango and Tambor de Mina were originally brought by black slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil. These black slaves would summon their gods, called Orixas, Voduns or Inkices with chants and dances they had brought from Africa. These cults were persecuted throughout most of Brazilian history, largely because they were believed to be pagan or even satanic. However, the Brazilian republican government legalized all of them on the grounds of the necessary separation between the State and the Church.

In current practice, Umbanda followers leave offerings of food, candles and flowers in public places for the spirits. Candomblé terreiros are more hidden from general view, except in famous festivals such as Iyemanja Festival and the Waters of Oxala in the Northeast.

From Bahia northwards there is also different practices such as Catimbo, Jurema with heavy Indigenous elements. All over the country, but mainly in the Amazon rainforest, there are many Indians still practicing their original traditions. Many of their beliefs and use of naturally occurring plant derivatives are incorporated into African, Spiritualists and folk religion.