2015, Pages 648–657
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.
Keywords
- Africa;
- Akan;
- Archetype;
- Ethnography;
- Fon;
- History;
- Humor;
- Inversion;
- Morality;
- Myth;
- Native America;
- Ritual;
- Structuralism;
- Transgression;
- Trickster;
- Yoruba
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