Origin of table manner / transleted by Jhon and Doreen Weightman

This is the third volume of the series A SCIENCE OF MYTHOLOGY, in which'Claude Levi-Strauss gives a Structuralist inter-
pretation of South-American India myths. Already, in The Raw and the Cooked and From Honey to Ashes, he has shown how this
strange, exotic oral literature, in which men and animals, ogres and demiurges undergo the most fantastic adventures, can
be given a meaning ifit is seen as an extra- ordinarily subtle and complex response of the pre-scientific Indian mind to all the
phenomena of the world: social, zoological, geographical, meteorological, astronomical, etc. Although, at first sight, the American Indian way of looking at things may seen totally remote from European ideas or customs, at certain points in the analysis the most surprising parallels occur, as those readers of the first two volumes will have recognised.

The present volume which, like the others, is written in such a way that it can be read as an independent whole, extends the inquiry to the myths of North, as well as South, America, and moves on from the consideration of the significance of the
different states of food, or of certain exceptional 'foods' such as honey and tobacco, to the elucidation of what the myths have
to say, directly or indirectly, about the ceremonies associated with eating. In all societies, there is a code of'table manners',
even when, as in most, there is no table; if you have ever wondered why European children are taught to eat quietly or why
the Catholic Church has rules about diet during Lent, Professor Levi-Strauss's comments will open up surprising trains of
thought, suggesting that in the human mind, everything - the domestic and the cosmic, the profane and the divine - is
closely interconnected.