The error of the nineteenth-century folklorists was not that they focused on similarities, but that their methods for alleging such similarities were not always sound. Much of what they did involved picking and choosing arbitrarily among inadequate ethnological data and inferring similarity where in many cases it did not exist.
Archetypes and motifs in folklore and literature : a handbook / edited by Jane Garry and Hasan El-Shamy
But with over a century of subsequent fieldwork to draw on, today both anthropologists and folklorists are in a better position to make cross-cultural comparisons than were the early folklorists. According to Dundes, studies in the distribution of myths reveal that while there is no myth that is truly universal, so is there no myth that has ever been found to be limited to a single culture (1984, 270). Elsewhere he concludes: “Mythology must be studied in
cultural context in order to determine which individual mythological elements reflect and which refract the culture. But, more than this, the cultural relative approach must not preclude the recognition and identification of transcultural similarities and potential universalities” (1962, 1048).
This is important. The hero’s journey is not universal. Not the way Joseph Campbell made it look like or what other writers who take it as universal might push it as a wonderful timeless recipe that only needs tailoring.
Human beings change. Slowly. We have changed from depicting conflicts to crave ideal worlds where everything gets fixed in a finger snap by marrying the rich, having a baby and there’s no great couple bouts. Easy slices of life. Otherwise, webtoons that repeat and repeat such an statement would have gone obsolete very quickly. It is not the case.
Why? Because the conditions young human beings are living now and will, are certainly different. They’re starting to face on imagined realities that went unchallenged for centuries. They still need purpose but they’re realizing purpose doesn’t come from the above or the below or anywhere else. They’re realising there’s the unchangeable human nature. They’re facing destruction in ways we have decided to ignore. They’re angry. Very angry.
They are less in need of a hero’s journey than they’re in need of Prozac.
Enjoy discovering what’s in need. Pasto kalo.