Joseph Campbell (Photo: Joseph Campbell Foundation)
Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), whose posthumous renown was fueled by the 1988 PBS broadcast of Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, called mythology “Humankind’s one great story.”
Campbell’s life-long passion began with a boyhood obsession with Native American culture. After seeing Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in 1911, he explored exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, read all of the Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology, and was seized by “the figure of an American Indian … with a look of special knowledge in his eyes.” Campbell would later pen the classic The Hero With a Thousand Faces, in which he detailed the hero’s journey schema, a universal pattern of human development that has inspired generations of artists, including Star Wars creator George Lucas.
Tonight, explore that “great story;” with Doug Herman, senior geographer at the American Indian Museum, and Robert Walter, Campbell’s friend, editor, and president and executive director of the Joseph Campbell Foundation. Their wide-ranging conversation touches on Campbell’s “Four Functions of Myth,” sacred and secular mythologies, the presidential election, culture wars, how mythologies and museums can empower or repress and manipulate people(s), and what it means to be fully human.
