We do not often think of stories as doing work. Tractors do work, and so do carpenters. Threshers do work, and so do those who clean houses. Steamrollers do work, and so do painters. But stories? What could they do that could possibly be considered to be work?
Anthropologists, and all of those who look at the underpinnings and the effects of stories, argue that stories do a great deal of work, and work that is essential for the maintenance of our own culture. Myths, along with other forms of traditional stories, do the work of teaching each new generation what the generation before it considers to be important about its culture and society. Myths are one of the most important media that exists for cultural transmission: More than almost anything else in any culture myths help to ensure that the culture itself will continue, that the gods and the languages and the beliefs and values that set one group of people apart from all other groups on earth will continue and will continue to distinguish that group from all other groups.
And yet - and this is at least as important as the ways in which myths help perpetuate culture - myths also allow culture to change. No culture can afford to be static, for the world changes around us, around each society. Dictators and tyrants have from time to time attempted to close their borders to ideas as well as to people, but in the end they always fail because cultures will always be permeable to ideas. Cultures change over time, and the primary function of myth - to which all of the subsidiary functions of myth that we will discuss in the next section contribute - is to sustain a people in their sets of beliefs. But myths and other cultural traditions must always (in a viable culture) allow for a certain amount of flexibility, allow the people who tell these stories to themselves and to their children to understand new things in the world within the context of old values.
Campbell summarizes th...