Why Does the Bear Have a Short Tail? Every Culture Answers Questions Like This

The term describes any narrative whose function is to account for the origin of something observable, and the range of things explained is enormous. A landscape feature, an animal's appearance, a ritual practice, a name, a taboo, a constellation and a social arrangement can all be the subject. The structure is consistent, presenting a state of affairs before the event, an incident, and the permanent consequence which is the present condition. The explanation is almost always narrative rather than mechanical, so something happened to somebody rather than a process operating.

The subjects cluster into recognisable groups worldwide:

• •Why an animal looks or behaves as it does
• •How a landscape feature, island or mountain came to be
• •Why a ritual must be performed in a particular way
• •The origin of fire, agriculture, weaving or language
• •Why a people occupies the territory it occupies
• •The origin of death, which is near universal

Reading such stories as attempts at science misses what they are doing, and treating them as evidence about the culture rather than about the world is far more productive. A story explaining why a particular clan may not eat a particular animal preserves a social arrangement. A story explaining a ritual frequently survives the ritual itself and is the only record that it existed. A story attaching a people to a landscape is a territorial claim in narrative form. The category is therefore studied for what it reveals about obligations, boundaries and anxieties, all encoded as accounts of the distant past.

The clustering of subjects across unconnected cultures is the interesting fact and it has several competing explanations. Universal human circumstances account for much of it, since every society faces death, fire, food and the visible sky and will produce accounts of them. Diffusion accounts for some, since stories travel readily along trade routes and a good explanation is easy to retell. Shared descent accounts for a little, where the cultures are related. Structural accounts argue that the human mind imposes recurring oppositions on whatever it explains. Most scholars now use all four rather than insisting on one.

A significant subset was invented after the thing it explains, which makes them useful in a different way. Greek writers routinely supplied explanations for rituals whose original meaning had been forgotten, and those explanations are demonstrably later than the practice. Place names attract stories built from a mistaken reading of the name, so a name meaning something dull in an older language acquires a dramatic origin tale. The same process is active now, producing confident explanations for expressions and customs that are invented, widely repeated and entirely false, which is the modern form of exactly the same impulse.

Stories explaining how something observable came to be form a consistent category worldwide, covering animals, landscapes, rituals, names and death, and they explain by narrative rather than by process. They are best read as evidence about the culture rather than about the world, preserving obligations and territorial claims. Many were invented after the practice they explain, and the impulse is still producing new ones.