Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms

FIVE: THE MYTH OF THE TRICKSTER: THE NECESSARY BREAKER OF TABOOS

FIVE THE MYTH OF THE TRICI(STER: THE NECESSARY BREAI(ER OF TABOOS Laura Makarius [Laura Makarius was very supportive of the Trickster Consultation of the American Academy of Religion, and she contributed to it directly and indirectly several times. Her essay, uLe mythe du 'Trickster'," Revue de l'histoire des religions (175) (1969): 17-46, is cited repeatedly, yet it has remained accessible only in French in a research library. An earlier translation by Christopher G. Nichols has been revised by William G. Doty. An article now over twenty years old cannot be expected to engage most recent scholarship, although we had hoped that Makarius would either revise or supplement her unique arguments for this volume. We can only wish that catastrophic illness had not prohibited the revisions Makarius might have contributed. One of our publisher's readers cautions us all to remember that several usages that were still possible in the 1960s are presently out of fashion: reference to "the African hunter" would now have to be documented and stipulated (which Africans, in which areas?); and an earlier generation of anthropologists sometimes failed to distinguish actual praxis (such as incest) from ritual or symbolic references. Makarius seeks to refute Radin as she sets the trickster into the sphere of ritual magic; the trickster-figure is the magician, the tabootransgressor ~but the reader can see how Makarius' interpretive con- BREAKER OF TABOOS 67 texts led her to her unique perspectives. The bibliography to this volume lists several of her other essays on tricksters and magic.-W.G.D.] I Recent works of African ethnography (Evans-Pritchard 1967; Marshall 1962; Wescott 1962; Wescott and Morton-Williams 1962, after Herskovits and Herskovits 1933 and 1958, and Tegnaeus 1950) have contributed new documents to the dossier of research on the problem of the mythic hero called "the trickster."l At first believed to be only Amerindian in scope, with the works of Luomala (1949, on Maui, the trickster of Polynesia and New Zealand) and Warner (1958, on Bamapama, the trickster of Arnhem Land, Australia), the problem became apparent in Oceania, and now involves Africa as well. While the discipline of ethnography has accumulated the requisite materials, it has not taken us very far on the road to their comprehension. It could even be said that some interpretive efforts-such as those of the psychologist lung, [the classicist] I(erenyi, and the ethnologist Radin, working together to decipher the enigma of the Winnebago Indian trickster (Radin 1955, cited from French ed. of 1958)-have thickened rather than dissipated the obscurity of the subject. Ethnologists, psychologists, mythologists, and historians of religion taking a sympathetic interest in the trickster are faced by a mass of contradictions. The mythic hero transforms nature and sometimes, playing the role of a demiurge, appears as the creator, but at the same time he remains a clown, a buffoon not to be taken seriously. He checks the course of the sun, cleaves monsters asunder, and defies the gods; at the same time he is the protagonist of obscene adventures from which he escapes humiliated and debased. He brings humankind the arts, tools, and civilizing goods; at the same time he plays abominable tricks for which humans have to pay much of the price. He dispenses the medicines that cure and save-and he introduces death into the world. Admired, loved, venerated for his merits and virtues, he is represented as thievish, deceitful, parricidal, incestuous, and cannibalistic. The malicious practical joker is deceived by just about anybody; the inventor of ingenious stratagems is presented as an idiot; the master of magical power is sometimes powerless to extricate himself from quandaries. It is 68 MAKARIUS as though each virtue or defect attributed to him automatically calls into being its opposite. The benefactor is also the fiend, the evil-minded one. Finally, in his most boorish as in his most contemptible aspects, in his greatness as well as his viciousness, the trickster is represented as being "sacred," a quality that no ridicule or abomination succeeds in effacing. If one limits oneself to examining this mythic complex in and of itself, without referring to extraneous realities, one can only choose between two paths: to strive to explain the coexistence of contradictory traits within one character, or to consider him as the result of the overlapping of two different characters. Those who have taken the first path have worn themselves out in psychological...