cts that are unfamiliar to us. This paper examines some of the overall guiding principles of studying a culture in a holistic and yet analytic fashion laid down by Malinowski and Levi-Strauss, looking in particular at how these two scholars have examined the related but distinct arenas of magic, ritual and myth. In order to make their thoughts on these basic and fundamentally important cultural complexes more fully grounded in the world of ethnographic research, their concepts will be used to explore the ethnographic work of Laurel Kendall and her explorations of myth, ritual and gender in Korea.
As noted above, in one form or another every act of anthropology comes down in the end to a way of trying to define culture. What is still often held to be the core definition of culture û perhaps we might call it the ur-definition of culture û was provided to the field by the 19th-century English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in the first paragraph of his Primitive Culture, first published in 1871:
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