ABSTRACT
‘cultivated’ or ‘learned’ mythologies of the Amerindian peoples have generally remained on the fringes of the mythological analysis proposed by the structuralist tradition. Comparing two sets of historical accounts of origin - one Mexica, taken from indigenous chroniclers of the 16th century and the other currently elaborated by authors from the Alto Rio Negro, in the Amazon - this paper wants to show the connection, and above all the dependence of this type of cultured stories on those other tales that once Lévi-Strauss called ‘popular’, and on which he based his analytical plan. Moreover, Lévi-Strauss’s observations about the ‘death’ or ‘degradation’ of myths have a great value to understand the making of learned narratives.
KEYWORDS
Mythology; Rio Negro; Mexico; Lévi-Strauss; travel of the snakeboat; Chicomoztoc