Programme rationale and outline

In order to enhance the quality of the discussion and to select sections of the extended field of Comparative Mythology that may resonate broadly among the intended participants, the Conference programme will be structured around the following four themes:

a.      Theoretical and methodological advances in the study of Comparative Mythology

From a somewhat antiquarian field of study evoking images of a dated form of philological scholarship, Comparative Mythology has gone through major developments in the last half century, due to advances in structuralist anthropology; the study of oral history, orality, textuality, performance, neurobiology, and the philosophy of myth; the critique of Orientalism and the rise of independent schools of mythological research outside the North Atlantic; the critique of structural-functionalism and its ‘charter’ explanation by reference to relatively recent events in terms, however, of mythical materials that are demonstrably millennia old and have meta-regional, even transcontinental distribution; the thinkability of global contexts of analysis, suggested by present-day globalisation as well as by state-of-the-art genetics and historical linguistics. As a result, global approaches to the Deep History of the mythology of Anatomically Modern Humans throughout a sizeable part of their 200,000 years of existence have recently been pioneered. But in the euphoria of such developments, a fresh look at theory and method will help us to keep our feet to the ground, and to identify growth-points for the near future. 

b.      Mythological continuities between Africa and the other continents

Until quite recently, African myths have been mainly studied from two disparate perspectives: as historical charters for recent socio-political arrangements, and as examples of performative orality. To these lines of research, to which African scholars have made a considerable contribution, recently a third line of approach has been added. Comparative mythology, in conjunction with genetics, comparative linguistics, comparative ethnography and archaeology, is now exploring the possibility of reconstructing the cultural history and hence the fundamental connectedness, even unicity, of Anatomically Modern Humans beyond the mere 5,000 years of documentary history. In this connection the absolutely central place of sub-Saharan Africa in that global cultural history has been highlighted: both before the Out-of-Africa Exodus (c. 80,000 Before Present), and in connection with the ‘Back-into-Africa’ return migration from Central and West Asia, from c. 15,000 years ago onwards. African myths have been argued to hold the key to these two patterns, since both would make us expect considerable mythological continuity between sub-Saharan Africa, and the rest of the Old World. Recently (e.g. during the First Annual Meeting of the IACM) critical attention has been paid to the idea (recently revived by Stephen Oppenheimer) according to which much of the mythology of the Western Old World (i.e. West Asia, Africa and Europe including the Bible, Ancient Near East, and Graeco-Roman Antiquity) is a secondary restatement of much older mythical material circulating in South East Asia since the early Holocene (10,000 Before Present). Seeking to enlist senior African researchers among the speakers, this section will critically consider the three approaches and probe into their complementarity.

c.       The mythology of dying and death

Myths about how death came into the world exist in every society and belong to the oldest known narratives in the world. The mystery of death is the key to religion, many scholars have argued. Comparative mythology can put the accompanying myths under scrutiny. The mythology of dying and death, its variability as well as similarities and resemblances across the globe and over time, appears to be a good candidate to unravel major concerns of humankind, particularly core values in life and beliefs about people's destiny. Improved insights into these myths – the frequently recurring themes and their trajectories – would assist the interpretation of archaeological findings so often resulting from mortuary practices of a deep history not to be uncovered in any other way. And the finds vice versa might provide clues to ancient myths or some of their themes. An analysis of the existent corpus of myths surrounding dying and death, including the ones entailing a personification of death or ancestral wrongdoing, would bring out a (probably limited) set of widespread ideas. To what extent these ideas can be detected in contemporary understandings of dying and death is a further question to be explored. The Finnish method (as well as structuralist myth analysis and cultural contextualisations of lived mythology) appears to be well suited for an approach to this genre of myths.

d.      Present-day mythologies: globalisation, the market, identity, conflict, evil and truth – such mythemes as cosmoclasm, the adversary, the trickster, panoptic omnipresence and omniscience, the saviour, and world order, in the public discourse of the early third millennium CE

In modernist discourse, a myth is a collective representation which science allows us to expose as an untruth; and mythology is the antiquarian study of the untruths of the past, and of distant places imperfectly domesticated into the modernist world order. However, from an equally valid alternative (post-modern) perspective, the claim of a privileged position (e.g. science) from which truth can be established is in itself a myth – and, if transposed from the domain of science to that of politics, ideology, identity and world religions, it is such claims that have made for the devastating conflicts rocking the world in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Viewed from this perspective, comparative mythology, far from being antiquarian, appears as a ‘royal road’ to the understanding of systems of symbolic legitimation and persuasion in the world today. The mythemes listed in the title of this section have a wide applicability, from militant Islam to the Christian right; from popular media images of world doom and world control to saviour figures such as Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins and current world leaders; from the Internet to pop stars; from paradisiacal freedom and leisure to panoptical surveillance and total unfreedom as inside the ogre’s belly, etc. Contributions are invited that take these themes beyond the journalistic platitudes they could easily remain, and achieve some depth in confronting their comparative and theoretical implications for an understanding of today’s global movements in the light of the time-honoured themes of Comparative Mythology. 

e.       Work in progress

Not all significant developments in recent Comparative Mythology can be subsumed under the above four headings. Moreover, not all contributions to the conference will need to be of the full-paper format (i.e. a one-hour slot with discussant, on the basis of a pre-circulated paper). In the Work in Progress section, shorter papers and posters will be accommodated. This also opens the opportunity for researchers from the Netherlands to join us, share their ongoing work with us and contribute to our discussions even though they cannot participate in the conference for the full three days. (Please note: Senior researchers resident in the Netherlands are very much invited to go for full conference participation through the submission of standard proposals for sections a-d).

f.        Business meetings: Annual Meeting of the International Association for Comparative Mythology

Papers are to be made available for the conference website no later than 10 days before the first conference day. The website will be password protected and (initially) only open to participants.

Each full paper will be introduced for 5-10 minutes by the author, and formally discussed by a discussant for another 5-10 minutes, after which the remaining time of the one-hour slot for each paper will be used for intensive general discussion. Format of shorter papers, and posters, still to be defined.

Programme outline (provisional)

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