Foreword

Academic studies—international relations (IR), security studies, political science, public policy studies, and other social sciences—are fully taken up with articulating things, ideas, events, and so on in words.

Both the concept of tacit knowledge and Michael Polanyi’s (1966) exploration of it, which are central to this realm of inquiry, remain underutilised resources in analysing the social world and, in particular, its political dimensions. So the notion that we might communicate with one another through silences perhaps seems odd, or even an oxymoron. But this is, as I have argued elsewhere and as the chapters in this book attest, precisely what political, organisational, societal, and what might be called theoretical myths enable.

Not everything worth studying is rendered explicit, in words. Legislators, other state actors, and community and social movement lead­ers know this. Studying such phenomena also has methodological—that is, both ontological and epistemological—implications. As Polanyi (1967, 306) put it:

The fact that we can possess knowledge that is unspoken is of course a common-place and so is the fact that we must know something yet unspo­ken before we can express it in words. It has been taken for granted in the philosophical analysis of language in earlier centuries, but modern positivism has tried to ignore it, on the grounds that tacit knowledge was not acces­sible to objective observation.

In collective settings such as communities, polities, and organisations, the public sharing of some ideas may become taboo when sufficient con­sensus has not (yet) been established to support such articulation. And yet, such ideas can still be known—tacitly, and knowledge is capable of being shared, by being communicated ‘tacitly’. That ideas can be com­municated through tacit means underlies the concept of ‘dog-whistling’ in politics (e.g. Safire 2008; Haney-Lopez 2014): a way of communi­cating to particular population groups while bypassing others for whom those ideas counter widely held values and norms, such that their explicit expression would incur cost of one sort or another (e.g. public sanction, derision, loss of face, etc.).

One of the key modes for the tacit communication of tacitly known ideas may usefully be called myths. As found in polities, organisations, or societies more broadly, such myths work to divert attention from what cannot, or should not, be said—if one wishes to preserve the illusion of commonality, of unity, and of collective peace. Myths are framing devices; they direct attention to certain features of their focus, while diverting it from other features. Myths block further inquiry, redirecting attention from expressions that might pose danger to the collective, because they challenge accepted views, towards things that are perceived to be more palatable, less threatening. Myths can be used to ‘explain’ states’ origins, for example, when these are contested, or to account for organisations’ operations in problematic situations. Myths can certainly be created for strategic purposes. Still, organisational and policy myths are not always intentionally designed with some strategy in mind, but emerge through less consciously explicit, intersubjective processes as people engage prob­lematic situations.

During a field study of the Israel Corporation for Community Centers (ICCC; matnassim in Hebrew), I found the Executive Director repeat­ing, at the close of the annual meeting of all agency staff, the question, ‘What are our goals?’ That made sense in the first few years, I thought; but why would he still need to ask it in year 10? Wouldn’t—shouldn’t— an organisation know its goals after a decade of operations? I came to see this as an organisational myth: the ICCC had been created to imple­ment certain national policies concerning immigrant integration, through largely non-formal educational programmes; yet the structural problems of ‘absorbing’ immigrants and the limited resources the ICCC had been given constrained their ability to demonstrate achievement of this policy goal. Paradoxically, the ritual of asking that question, annually, in the set­ting of that meeting, at its high point, effectively blocked further inquiry into the impossibility of the organisation achieving its mandate under the circumstances at hand (Yanow 1992, 1996; Chap. 7).

Another dimension of myths—the indeterminacy of their meaning—is illustrated, inadvertently, in another part of my work. While teaching in The Netherlands in 1994, a series of experiences opened my eyes to the extent to which the state’s Jews lived, still, in a sort of hiding from their Christian and secular Dutch neighbours, something that I could not easily reconcile with what I and other Americans ‘knew’ about the state—that it had been, and was, a great friend and protector of its Jewish residents. Trying to puzzle out where that notion came from, I hit on the role that Anne Frank’s diary—the book, but also its theatre and film versions— played in shaping American Jews’ images of Holland. The diary focused on the role of those who sustained the Frank family and others hiding from the Nazis over many months, at risk to their own lives. At the same time, however, it diverted attention from the fact that a Dutch person revealed them to the authorities, leading to the murder in the Bergen­Belsen concentration camp of all but Anne’s father.

Myth can be a useful concept not only in analysing societal, policy, and organisational settings, but also in interrogating academic discourses. There, myths enable the perpetuation of theories that have been success­fully challenged by other theories and which therefore should have been relinquished, but as they continue to do some sort of persuasive explana­tory work for some portion of that epistemic community the latter are not prepared to give them up. The example that comes most readily to hand is the continued belief in the unity of science, in falsifiability, in the possibility of objective knowledge from outside the study of human acts— all those ideas that are the heritage of logical positivist and neo-positivist thinking, which continue to bedevil various political science practices. For a current example, see Jeffery Isaac’s (2015) editorial arguing against the implications of those ideas for journal practices. To take another example, to the extent that there is also a creation myth for IR, as this volume’s editor argues (see Bliesemann de Guevara, Chap. 1), it most likely persists not only ‘despite’ evidence to the contrary, but because it does presum­ably important, or possibly even necessary, work for the discipline, perhaps including bracketing further inquiry that might reveal IR to be naked in some sense, like the emperor parading around without clothes. But as Vickers (n.d.) pointed out with respect to the emperor parading around without clothes, there are times when the crowd needs to believe that their naked ruler is fully clothed, contrary visual evidence notwithstanding.

This is also the downside of myths’ work: they are a conservative enter­prise, standing in the way of new thinking and social change until the collective is more ready to contemplate it and act accordingly. Consider the civil rights movement in the USA: the myth of the colour line—attri­butions of negative behavioural and cognitive traits to African Americans and other Americans of perceptually non-European heritage—preserved the status quo, diverting attention from social injustices and constitutional violations, and preventing change; opposition, and consensus around it, grew over time, but their articulation—which fundamentally challenged entrenched ways of doing things—entailed countless physical beatings and loss of life. Making explicit the tacit knowledge underpinning political and other myths, then, is not always without cost.

What are we to make of this book’s notion that myths are very real elements of, and indeed central to, contemporary life? The idea, the very language, poses a challenge to the emotionless reason and ‘objectivity’ that are understood to be the hallmarks of science. Here is where the methodological orientation of interpretive inquiry comes into play, given its central tenet that ‘expressive’ dimensions of human experience, includ­ing myths, are as central to social and political life as rational planning and policy-making, and that these can be studied ‘scientifically’ even when encompassing not only ‘facts’, but values (e.g. Rabinow and Sullivan 1985/1979; Polkinghorne 1983; Hiley et al. 1991; Yanow and Schwartz- Shea 2014; Bevir and Rhodes 2016).

The concept of myth has, of course, an ancient history in the study of literature. Consider the Greek and Roman mythologies, of which Edith Hamilton, for instance, wrote. Anthropologists brought a parallel concept to the study of contemporary cultures, studying, for example, the mythical traditions of the Navajos or the Hindus. As interesting as these narratives are, however, they have the effect of exoticising ‘myth’, suggesting that it is something long ago or far away.

The sorts of myths engaged in this book—political, organisational, societal—are infrequently storied. Such myths may have no plots; no char­acters to be developed; no climaxes and resolutions, nor even beginnings, middles, and ends, as so much of the story-telling and narrative meth­ods literature requires, following an Aristotelian approach (see Shenhav 2015, 14, for an argument against that definition, given that we often do not know how political ‘stories’ will end). Consider, for example, what I would posit is a societal myth well entrenched in the state where I cur­rently live: ‘The Netherlands is a tolerant society.’ So much evidence has emerged from the morass of silence, which contradicts this reputed toler­ance—from the recovery of the state’s neglected history of slavery, to the acknowledgement of its active role in helping the Nazis to round up Jews and others for transport to concentration camps and certain death, to the demonization of darker-skinned Dutch, including those from Antillean and other backgrounds, which carries over into daily life from the annual embrace of St. Nicholas’ helper Zwarte Piet/Black Pete—all of which contradicts this reputed tolerance. The tolerance myth, as I will call it, is a simple statement, not a story, not even an argument. It asserts a truth. And in that assertion, it stops further inquiry into, and discourse concerning, the intolerance embedded in celebrating, annually, ritually, the racialised character of the white-skinned Netherlander putting on the black-face of the slave. In this sort of analytical view of myths and the work they do for collective life, such ritualised acts—those put into practice repeatedly, on regularised occasions—are seen as the manifestations of the ideas that their associated myths embody.

These sorts of myths can block critical reflection into aspects of social, political, or organisational life for which public consensus does not (yet) hold. A simple statement—‘Our goals are... ’—can keep inquiry at bay, thereby promoting the surface calm. Its form is neither reasoned argument nor narratively delivered story. Theoretically distancing myths not only in time and space but also in structural form work to ghettoise the concept, keeping us from seeing the work that myth can do in contemporary social, political, and organisational life and removing it from treatment in fields of study other than literature and anthropology.

Some might argue that we should get rid of myths—that they are anti­rationalist, perhaps even anti-scientific (or anti-science). This seems to me to parallel the Aristotelian or more recent Davidsonian arguments con­cerning metaphors: figures of speech that ‘merely’ decorate language that without them would be transparent, clear, and concise—and closer to the reasoned discourse of science. However, we do not, in fact, live in a tech­nical-rational world, and, much like Monsieur Jourdain in Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, we speak in metaphors all the time, as Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have amply demonstrated—including in our scientific writings and speakings (on this point, see e.g. Brown 1976; Gusfield 1976; McCloskey 1985, 1994; Miller 1985, 1992; Schon 1979). QED—quod erat demonstrandum—then, with respect to the relative commonplaceness of myths.

Why do myths persist? Because consensus concerning what the myth masks is not yet sufficient, and because of a widespread fear that ‘speaking truth to power’ (to borrow policy analyst Aaron Wildavsky’s book title) will reveal the societal cracks that belief in that myth works to plaster over. ‘Myth’ need not mean ‘false belief’ in an ideological, consciousness-rais­ing sense. The concept has been theorised, too, in (structural-) functional­ist ways, but it need not be. To ask what work myths do may serve similar ends, although that approach shifts the ontological terrain (reinterpreting and reframing the meaning of ‘function’). We need more systematic work thinking through the relationships between ‘myth’ and ‘narrative’, explor­ing the framing work that myths accomplish, and investigating the con­ceptual links and distinctions between myths and other framing devices, such as metaphors and rituals. That the concept has analytic purchase, even power, is attested to by the empirical research presented in the chap­ters in this book, some of which build on the approaches sketched out here, others of which develop other lines of thought. These several chap­ters move the project of myth theorising and analysis further in these and other important directions. They should inspire other theorists of contem­porary human life to examine the concept’s utility for other settings and other avenues of inquiry.

Dvora Yanow

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