Myths
Myths are stories that, through symbol and metaphor, provide explanations of how human life came to be. Myth serves various social functions. At the basic level it has meaning only to its immediate group, providing a formalized statement of group values and attitudes and thereby promoting social solidarity. Through ritual enactment, myth helps mask individual and wider social insecurity by repetitive, anticipated activity that renders the future predictable by its conformity with the past. Myth makes permanent the organizational structures by which society is integrated and sanctions this order by involving supernatural agents in the affairs of the living.
While these qualities of myth influence society by promoting stability and continuity, like all social constructions it is susceptible to manipulation. The effect of myth in societies that do not record collective memory is to anchor basic structural principles in time through endless verbal repetition and ritual drama. As such, myth provides the authority of long-term tradition and through repetition it resists change. However, myths and their associated social meanings are not immutable. For instance, modern myths of Andean highlanders some times include obvious European references in order to explain the profound impact of colonization. Similarly Hawaiian myths incorporated English practices and characteristics into their own mythic structures following the confrontations with Captain Cook and his followers. Thus, in order to fulfill their role of explaining the circumstances and relations of a particular group through time and space, myths can and must adjust to address profound changes in the social condition.
Myth and ritual serve to cloak the rules and strictures of society in the authority of timeless social tradition. But within this context of structural continuity, they possess the flexibility to accommodate major historical events. This adjustment must, of course, occur through the intentional action of the group members who, after all, are the agents who construct and perpetuate myths. It is possible, then, for such human agents to redirect myths and their ritual dramatization to serve their own interests, especially at times of major social flux. By so doing, they assert their own interests within the powerful context of long-term cultural tradition and supernaturally ordained sanction. Here, myth and ritual can become potent political agents for normalizing unequal power relationships while continuing to perpetuate the embedded structures of social life.