Abstract

Littleton's introduction for the American reader to the eminent founder of neocomparativism in cultural anthropology remedies the unjustifiable neglect in which the contributions of this school are held, both by anthropologists and philosophers of the social sciences. Many suggestions from generative semantics and functional sociology are so pointed and so well founded that without them our analytical research efforts on human action and even our ordinary language techniques seem somewhat arbitrary and individualistic. Whether suggestions from these rich bodies of knowledge will have the power to bring about wider acceptance of new and more sophisticated forms of comparativism is yet to be seen. The methodic principles applied by Dumézil throughout his extensive writings, over a forty year period, are principles which affect the very source of reason, viz., the language medium which gives life to structures and models. Dumézil argues that discourse and life obey the same logic, just as in a drama the plot provides both the form, the organization of the sense, and the sense itself. Such is for Dumézil the core of all symbolism, and the basis for the correspondence between linguistic fact and societal fact. There is an excellent bibliography.—A. M.