Sam D. Gill

“Making Them Speak”: Colonialismand the Study of Mythology

The role and importance of mythology, as term and category, in the study of religion and culture is critically examined. The focal example is Baldwin Spencers study of an Australian aboriginal culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spencer trained in England as a biologist. As an ethnographer he was exemplary of his time in his joining of morphological and evolutionist epistemologies. Mythology, it is argued, is an analytical category that has often invited the inappropriate conjunction of these analytical approaches. As is shown in the case examined, mythology is sometimes concocted in order to meet academic interpretive expectations. This approach characterizes colonialism in demanding that, to have any existence at all, the subjects studied must speak in the terms of received analytical categories such as myth.