Analysis of Binary Oppositions in Jamshid's Story based on Levi Strauss’s Theory

Abstract

‘Binary opposition’ is the fundamental basis of Jamshid’s story and characterizes the two periods of gratitude and ingratitude in Jamshid’s life. In the deep structure, there are two binary opposition principles called “overvaluation of kinship" (OOK) and “undervaluation of kinship" (UOK). The first principle has given a positive light to all events Jamshid’s gratitude and the second portrays all events of Jamshid’s ingratitude negatively. In the binary opposition view of Levi-Strauss, each event is called “mythyme” and, in this article, all the story of Jamshid from the ‘synchronic’ point of view is divided into forty mythymes in two periods on the basis of OOK and UOK and is presented in a table. This categorization reveals that two sorts of overtly ‘binary opposition of cause and effect’ and ‘binary opposition of contradiction’ exist in Jamshid’s story that help to express the final meaning of each mythyme and general meaning of the story’s opposition periods. Ultimately, the final results, on the analysis of the story's binary opposition, show that the story ends with the destruction of Jamshid and humiliation of Iranians. This is because there are more mythymes in Jamshid's ingratitude period than in his gratitude period. What has been said is an abstract that the present article that presents in detail with Levi Strauss's binary opposition theory to answer some basic questions about the structure of this story in Shahnameh.

Keywords

• Binary Opposition
• Myth
• Shahnameh
• Jamshid
• Levi Strauss