Trickster Ethnography

Abstract

The trickster figure in anthropology, folklore, and religious studies has been used to examine how a society understands itself through the study of transgressive characters and local notions of creativity. Tricksters are fundamentally dual raising ontological and epistemological questions about rationality, morality, temporality, and meaning. Tricksters have been important signs of irreverence and inversion and shift between tellers of mythic tales, world makers, culture heroes, selfish hustlers, and agents of change who playfully navigate violent worlds. They are linguistic and ritual mediators, translators standing at the crossroads of mythic and historic time, spiritual and social space, animal and human subjectivities. As tricksters have been identified across various societies, the category of trickster at times tells us more about a process of reductionist inquiry and the anthropological desire for analytic categories than about the lived worlds in which these diverse figures live.The trickster figure is a mediator who stands on the border between realms, showing how a society understands itself by embodying its transgressions. In anthropology, folklore, and religious studies, identification of the category of the trickster has been a way to fit various apparently transgressive characters and social phenomena into a model of social cohesion. This speaks both to the history of anthropology as well as to fundamental ontological and epistemological questions regarding rationality, duality, temporality, and meaning raised in ethnographic inquiry. Tricksters are fundamentally dual. They are important signs of irreverence and inversion and shift between tellers of mythic tales, world makers, culture heroes, selfish hustlers, and agents of change. In a sense, tricksters have provided a way to theorize the social relevance of creativity. They are linguistic and ritual mediators, translators standing at the crossroads of mythic and historic time, spiritual and social space, and animal and human socialities. The trickster literature speaks to recently renewed debates in anthropology about the relationship between nature and culture as well as difference and translatability.Coyote, Raven, and Hare in various Native American mythic traditions have been characterized as tricksters igniting scholarly debates about how one character can be both "culture hero" and "selfish-buffoon." Eshu, the Yoruba trickster and Legba in Dahomey are trickster deities that oversee markets and crossroads and mediate spiritual divination and all sorts of risk. The Tortoise in Yoruba (Owomoyela, 1997) and the Akan Spider trickster Ananse are central to mythic storytelling and mediators of social, linguistic, and spiritual transformations. Loki from Norse mythology is a shape-shifting god of mischief. In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a trickster who fooled Zeus to give mankind fire. The Greek Hermes, emerging from Sanskrit and Aryan traditions and later reincarnated as the Roman Mercury, is a trickster as messenger of the gods, inventor of t...

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