Eurocentricism is Making Things Fall Apart

It’s interesting that Foster believes that myth and religion are not inextricably bound enough to go into the same chapter. Now, I’m not trying to deny any religious beliefs, but some of the anecdotes out of modern religions are pretty, well, anecdotal. So in literature, I’m wondering, when does religion reach its expiration date and become mythology? Is it when the religion has no followers left? Or can parts of a religion be myth, but structurally be considered a belief? Not to get redundant, but this is ALL Greek to me.
Foster attempts to clarify this by stating that it’s a work that matters. That seems a little too ambiguous. Shakespeare matters, and it’s neither. I’m going to take a sec and and personally draw the line between myth and religion. A religion must have living followers and have a structure of personal beliefs (e.g. Pillars of Islam, The Ten Commandments, etc.). Mythology is (and just to clarify they DO overlap) a dead religion with fantastical imagery (e.g. Zeus turning into a swan and well… you know).
Now that that’s out of the way, I can make a point.
It’s common, in our Eurocentric culture, to hear the word”myth” or “mythology” and think immediately of the Greeks and Romans, however, as Foster points out, there are many other cultures from which myths and mythology come from. Foster elaborates on this in his example of Morrison’s, “Song of Solomon.” Many readers immediately compared the ending to the myth of Icarus and not the story of The Flying Africans for which it was intended.
This reminds me of cultural appropriation in modern society. While audiences assuming a plot point in a novel is not inherently cultural appropriation, it IS the result of a Eurocentric society. In the classroom, people of European descent tend to be credited for (
or forget to mention who pioneered principles) amazing or interesting things they didn’t come up with. For example, my peers and I are usually amazed to recall that algebra and most basic maths were developed by Arabic scholars al Khwarizmi and Omar Khayyam among others.
While lots of symbolism is from Greek and Roman mythology, a major problem with literature is that too much credit and representation is given to voices of European descent. So while this chapter features Toni Morrison, a world-renowned black author, and goes on to talk about how Homer inspires a Caribbean tale, naming the chapter, “It’s Greek to Me,” (while it is just a figure of speech) seems very limiting.

As a result of my surroundings, my knowledge on other culture’s mythology is very limited, however, in the novels of China Achebe, one can easily find patterns and plot points attached to Igbo mythology and ritual (http://www.the-criterion.com/V4/n1/Geetha.pdf). In all of his books, but especially in Arrow of God, there are found ritualistic re-enactments of oral histories. This is where mythology and history sort of overlap as well. Historical figures in many Northeast African cultures become like mythological figures because of this tradition of oral history.