Trickster as Premodern Avatar of Postmodern Research Practice

10.1177/1077800403254731 ARTICLEQUALITATIVE INQUIRY / October 2003Kamberelis / TRICKSTER AS PREMODERN AVATAR

Ingestion, Elimination, Sex, and Song:Trickster as Premodern Avatar

of Postmodern Research Practice

George KamberelisUniversity at Albany, State University of New York

In this article, I argue that the mythological figure of the Trickster may be read as apremodern avatar of postmodern research practice or what Denzin and Lincoln called thesixth and seventh moments of qualitative inquiry. I begin by describing the key impera-tives of the sixth and seventh moments. These imperatives include (a) a commitment tomorally sound, praxis-oriented research; (b) strategic use of eclectic constellations of the-ories, methods, and research strategies; (c) production of dialogic, nonrepresentationaltexts; and (d) conduct of mindful inquiry resulting in sacred texts. In a modest attemptto write not only about but also in the sixth and seventh moments, I offer extensivedescriptions and interpretations of the extant narratives of the Winnebago Trickster,Wakdjunkaga, making indirect or oblique connections to sixth and seventh momentimperatives along the way. I return to these connections in the end of the article and makethem more explicit.

Keywords: postmodern research practice; postfoundational epistemologies; seventhmoment imperatives; abductive reasoning

The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discov-ers. It never resigns itself to anything. That is the deepest meaning ofrebellion.

—Anaïs Nin

Maurice Merleau-Ponty called it the knowledge of the body-subject,reminding us that it is through our bodies that we live in the world. Hecalled it knowledge in the hands, and knowledge in the feet. It is alsoknowledge in the womb. Eve knew it, but she let on, and was exiled fromEden, the world of divine law, for her indiscretion. We, her daughters,have kept silent for so long that now we have forgotten that knowledgefrom and about the body is also knowledge about the world.

—Madeleine Grumet

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In this article, I argue that the mythological figure of the Trickster may beread as a premodern avatar of postmodern research practice or what Denzinand Lincoln (2000) called the sixth and seventh moments of qualitativeinquiry. Research practice in the sixth and seventh moments constitutes aresponse to the triple crisis of representation, evaluation, and praxis, and it ismotivated by several key imperatives. The crisis of representation (Clifford &Marcus, 1986; Marcus & Fischer, 1986) challenged the long-held representa-tional politics and practices of traditional anthropology, which posited thatWestern researchers could accurately capture and represent “exotic non-western others” in their texts (even multimedia texts). This challenge shookthe very foundations of enlightenment epistemologies, grounded as they arein a logic of verification and a correspondence theory of truth—the idea thatwe can both discover and represent the facts and laws of an a priori objectivereality. Since this crisis, representations are no longer viewed as “mirrors ofnature” (Rorty, 1979) but as constructions of experiences and events filteredthrough the “terministic screens” (Burke, 1986) of their authors. As Burke(1986) so eloquently noted, these terministic screens not only reflect but alsoselect and deflect what we see, experience, and render into texts.

The crisis of evaluation followed directly from the crisis of representation.If researchers’ accounts were not mirrors but manufacturers of reality that atbest embodied a strong form of verisimilitude, then traditional forms of eval-uating research accounts (e.g., validity, reliability, and generalizability) wereno longer relevant. Instead, research accounts had to be assessed along morepragmatic lines—whether they were useful, whether they restored the for-ward movement and productivity of human activity that had become boggeddown or no longer productive (Packer & Addison, 1989), and whether theyfunctioned to expose and transform hegemonic regimes of truth and asym-metrical power relations (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987; Lather, 1993). Thus,evaluation strategies based on verisimilitude, emotionality, personal respon-sibility, an ethic of caring, political praxis, dialogic research practice, andplurivocal texts replaced those based on positivist notions of validity, reliabil-ity, and generalizability (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).

The crisis of evaluation called for the resurrection of some key tropes ofMarxist social theory, especially Marx’s insistence on praxis—the articulationof theory and practice designed to make the world a better and more equita-ble place for all to live. As such, the crisis of praxis constitutes a challenge tothe privileging of discourse in theory and research (i.e., the idea that every-thing can be reduced to a text and that changing representational forms will inturn change material reality). Instead, a praxis orientation insists thatresearch function as a political force to change material conditions so thatpower and other social and material goods are distributed more equally(Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).

According to Denzin and Lincoln (2000), the sixth and seventh moments ofqualitative inquiry constitute a response to this triple crisis. As I will argue in

674 QUALITATIVE INQUIRY / October 2003



this article, Trickster is a cultural figure that like the sixth and seventhmoments also constitutes a response to the triple crisis of representation,legitimation, and praxis. In all his/her1 mundane and bizarre activities, he/she always functions to expose the gap between cultural systems and possi-ble realities, to negate the fact-value distinction, and to make the world abetter place to live in not only for himself/herself but also for others.

The sixth and seventh moments of qualitative inquiry embody several keyimperatives, four of which are particularly relevant for my purposes here.The first imperative is a commitment to morally sound social science inquiryrooted in praxis—research practice that is politically strategic, that movesbeyond both a sense of dialogic impotence and outright rage to connect theo-ries and methods with concrete action in the world that makes a difference interms of collective moral development, social justice, and the goals of democ-racy. “The seventh moment asks that social sciences and humanities becomesites for critical conversations about democracy, race, gender, class, nation-states, globalization, freedom, and community” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, p. 3).

I would add to Denzin and Lincoln’s (2000) call for praxis-orientedresearch a reminder that all political activity is risky business. Talking andworking across differences of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and so on isoften volatile and unpredictable. Although it has enormous productivepotential, praxis always runs the risk of failing or even producing unintendedeffects that may make matters even worse.

If he/she is anything, Trickster is embodied praxis whose means may beunconventional, even ostensibly self-centered at times, but whose ends arealmost always communal and democratic. Moreover, Trickster’s basic modeof being is one of intervention. He/she constantly intervenes into the “real.”All of her/his activities are deterritorializations and reterritorializations(Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987). Finally, Trickster’s praxis produces bothdesired (and desirable) and undesired (and undesirable) effects.

A second imperative of sixth and seventh moment qualitative inquiry ismethodological syncretism. Rather than privileging a single method orapproach to the practice of inquiry, researchers are encouraged to use what-ever techniques, strategies, and frameworks are required to conduct the bestresearch possible and to produce research accounts that embody verisimili-tude and that are poetic, transgressive, unfinalizable, and transformative(Denzin & Lincoln, 2000). In this regard, researchers are bricoleurs (Levi-Strauss, 1966) whose choices about which research strategies to use are con-tingent on the research questions asked, the ever-changing exigencies of theresearch context, and the shifting praxis goals of the community beingresearched. As bricoleurs, qualitative researchers are also shape-shifters whomay “take on multiple and gendered images: scientist, naturalist, fieldworker,journalist, social critic, artist, performer, jazz musician, filmmaker, quiltmaker, essayist” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, p. 4).

Kamberelis / TRICKSTER AS PREMODERN AVATAR 675



Qualitative researchers use semiotics, narrative, content, archival andphonemic analysis, even statistics, tables, graphs, and numbers. They alsodraw on and use the approaches, methods, and techniques of ethnomethodology,phenomenology, hermeneutics, feminism, rhizomatics, deconstructionism,ethnography, interviews, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, survey research,and participant observation, among others (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000).

Trickster too is not only a consummate bricoleur but also a strategic shape-shifter. She/he uses whatever means are available and necessary to accom-plish her/his goals. Unconstrained by categorical and methodologicalboundaries, he/she uses hallucinogens, herbs, other creatures, his/her vari-ous sexual organs, dreams, textual implicatures, and all manner of materialand discursive resources to do her/his creative work.

A third imperative of sixth and seventh moment qualitative inquiry is theproduction of open, nonrepresentational texts. Drawing on key insights fromthe postmodern/poststructural turn, research activity is always implicated inand partially constitutes the people and events researched. Thus, it is ludi-crous to think that texts based on such activity simply represent those peopleand events. Instead, texts must be as creative, dynamic, multiple, andunfinalized as the research activity they index. “Montage and pentimento,like jazz which is improvisation, create the sense that images, sounds, andunderstandings are blending together, overlapping, forming a composite, anew creation” (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, p. 4). Indeed, Trickster and all of his/her texts are far from representational. Instead, they are creative, dynamic,and multiple. In fact, Trickster may be read as an almost pure embodiment ofcultural creativity, dynamism, and multiplicity.2

A fourth imperative of the sixth and seventh moments is constitutivelyrelated to the first and involves the cultivation of sacredness and the construc-tion of sacred textualities. According to Berman (1981), Fox (1992), Reason(1993), and many others, we in the Western world have lost our sense of thesacred, the ability to notice sacredness in experience and the world. They goon to say that we need to rediscover it if we really hope for better lives and abetter world. This crisis of the sacred has its roots in the shift from premodernto modern epistemologies that came with the Enlightenment philosophies ofthe 17th century. Premodern epistemologies construed consciousness asembodied, organic, participatory, and communal. The premodern world is aworld that is enchanted, wondrous, and alive, and we are fundamentally apart of it. Enlightenment epistemologies construed the mind as separate fromthe body and thus subjective experience and knowledge as separate fromobjective reality. The modern world is a world that may be known only indi-rectly, and our relations with it are instrumental, mechanical, and functional.To engage in sacred inquiry, then, requires a return to more embodied,organic, participatory, communal ways of thinking. When our knowing, ourexperiencing, our relationships, and our actions honor life and the planet thatnurtures it, then they will also be sacred. Sacred inquiry and the construction




of sustaining sacred textualities involve creating lives with others and withthe many worlds of our experience through loving, imaginative, exploratory,critical sense-making reflection that informs our future actions and experi-ence. They involve directing human intention and action toward purposesthat seem worthy of our attention because they both envisage and producequalities of personhood and the world that are desirable, good, and just. Insum, sacred inquiry and the construction of sacred textualities require experi-encing and valuing the world as a living presence filled with love, mystery,and wonder; representing that experience in ways that bring out the world’sbeauty and goodness; understanding and framing experience in ways thatheal our alienation and are not alienating themselves; and acting in ways thathelp restore wholeness to ourselves, to our research participants, to ourhuman communities, and to the natural world (Reason, 1993).

As I will argue throughout, Trickster is not only the figure around which aset of sacred texts has been constructed, he/she also lives by the principles ofsacred action even when it seems that she/he doesn’t. In this regard, Tricksteris not so much a sacred being as an expression of the way that the whole uni-verse may become meaningful, sacred, and filled with power.

INTRODUCING TRICKSTER

Trickster is a complex figure who is prevalent in a wide variety of culturesand whose stories have elicited a long and varied history of scholarly com-mentary. Within this commentary, Trickster has been read in a plethora ofways. Radin (1945, 1956, 1970), for example, rendered him/her both as a sym-bol of a relatively primitive stage of the evolution of human consciousnessand as a tension-releasing function for society. For Jung (1956, 1951/1973),Trickster was both a symbol for the process of psychological developmentfrom infantilism to individuation and a collective “shadow” figure that repre-sents the dark side of culture and is usually projected onto the opposition orenemy. Campbell (1969) drew compelling connections between the figure ofTrickster and the figures of shamans and spiritual visionaries. For Kristeva(1974/1984), Trickster represented creative and unlimited semiosis. Street(1972) pointed out that Trickster represents the delicate balance between thehuman potentials for creativity and destruction. “To question everything insociety would lead to anarchy; to preserve everything would lead to stagna-tion; the conflict is presented, and the balance achieved, in the trickster taleswhich so many societies possess” (p. 97). Girard (1972/1977) read Trickster asa source of cultural violence. And for Pelton (1974), Trickster represented thehuman race “individually and communally seizing the fragments of his expe-rience and discovering in them an order sacred by its very wholeness” (p.255).3 The partial legitimacy and usefulness of some of these readings not-withstanding, most seem both theoretically partial and theoretically myopic.




Not only do they render Trickster as a relic of the past, they also seem to elideher/his most central meanings and functions in the various cultural spaces inwhich he/she operates. Thus, I propose a different reading of Trickster in thisarticle—one that is rooted in the suspicion that Trickster is the creative locusand method of human experience, inquiry, and understanding. As such, he/she embodies/reflects the human capacity to (a) engage in abductive4 prac-tices (bricolage) that bring forth new modes of being and acting from not-yet-articulated possibilities and (b) create abductive texts (montage, pentimento,and pastiche) that disrupt culturally contrived/inscribed boundaries. As Ihave already noted, such a reading also renders Trickster as a harbinger ofwhat Denzin and Lincoln (2000) called the sixth and seventh moments ofqualitative research. Because I read Trickster in this particular way, I do nottreat her/him simply as a cultural text (or representation). Instead, I maphim/her as a complex set of cultural forces with real effects, albeit emergentand contingent ones.

In addition, instead of dealing with the figure of Trickster as a composite,one abstracted from various times and cultures, I will focus my argumentsaround one particular Trickster—Wakdjunkaga, the Winnebago Trickster.5 Ifocus on this particular figure for two primary reasons. First, the WinnebagoTrickster cycle collected by Radin (1956) is one of the most complete and mostextensive of all extant Trickster cycles. Second, Wakdjunkaga is probably themost pure Trickster figure to be found across all Amerindian cultures as wellas all cultures around the world. What I mean by this is that she/he isuniquely distinct both from the Winnebago creator, Earthmaker, and theWinnebago culture hero, Hare. This relative purity affords a more straightfor-ward interpretation of Trickster’s cultural nature and functions.

Different explanations have been offered for the fairly unusual occurrenceof a pure trickster type in the Winnebago tradition. Radin (1956) argued, forexample, that the Trickster cycle represents a very ancient, traditional, andsacred myth type that was preserved because of the unique circumstances ofWinnebago history. As an alternative explanation, Piper (1975) contendedthat the Trickster cycle is free from creator and culture hero elements becauseit is the work of recent literary artists who expunged these other characteris-tics. These speculations notwithstanding, we really do not know why theWinnebago Trickster comes to us as he/she does.

INTO THE FRAY OF MYTH

Trickster is a many-sided figure who defies singular characterization andis composed of an admixture of divine, human, and animal attributes. Insome respects, he/she is supernatural or at least closely aligned with the spir-itual and the sacred. For example, she/he can communicate with all mannerof substance and being—rocks, plants, animals, and humans. She/he can slip




with ease back and forth across the border between the sacred and the pro-fane. He/she knows the secrets of dreams. She/he has been delegated(explicitly or implicitly) with the power to establish the conditions of theworld as it is. She/he manages to subdue some of the forces that pose threatsto human welfare and to establish a space for creative, dialogic, democraticliving. Finally, he/she departs from the world with the gratitude and admira-tion of his/her people, never to return.

At the same time, Trickster is “all too human” (Nietzsche, 1879/1986). He/she is often vain and self-indulgent, ignoring the needs and warnings of oth-ers in his/her wanderings, exploits, and entanglements. Yet she/he almostalways shows genuine compassion for her/his friends and relatives, evenrisking her/his own safety (and life) to secure for them the essential commod-ities of life. For the Winnebago, Trickster’s foibles, risks, and pragmatic activi-ties were absolutely essential for the establishment of a world in which peoplecould lead productive, fulfilling, and happy lives.

Finally, Trickster comes to us in the form of many different animals (some-times a hybrid consisting of features from many animals). Indeed, her/hisbasic motivational structure is as animal-like as it is human. He/she is “ofnature” in the most profound sense. Most of Trickster’s interactions, forexample, are with nonhumans—other animals, plants, rocks, and so on—with whom he/she often shares the same territory and with whom she/he isalways able to communicate. And his/her most pervasive needs are quitebodily and basic—food, shelter, warmth, and sex. In sum, Trickster is consti-tuted at the most marvelous intersection of the sublime, the everyday, and theludic.

Trickster is transformation and metamorphosis. He/she creates unity outof multiplicity and multiplicity out of unity. She/he creates chaos out of orderand order out of chaos. In him/her arises the possibility not only of meaningbut also of interpretive polysemy in a world of static quiet created byEarthmaker, a mythic figure I will discuss in detail later. Trickster makes theworld a certain kind of place by deconstructing cultural discourses such asthose of sex, which before him existed only as structured opposites (mascu-line and feminine) without the pain, pleasure, and creative power of inter-course. Trickster creates modes of being and understanding that might becalled universal, derived from the Latin uni + versus and literally meaning “aturning towards one.” Yet unity remains ludic (even ludicrous) because it isconstituted out of such difference: earth, water, sky, rocks, plants, and ani-mals. As I will demonstrate through various examples, Trickster erases theboundaries between culturally distinct existents—which prior to his/herarrival in the world were separate—by dislodging them. In Earthmaker’sscheme, these existents are confined to separate lodges. Trickster disrupts thisseparateness and quietude by virtue of her/his own multiple and shape-shifting mode of being—a paradoxical, metamorphic mode, replete withpenis, passage, and song, all of which are powerful instruments of creation. In




whirlwind fashion, Trickster draws everything around him into motion andmeaning, thus refashioning the formal and intentional purposes assigned tothem by Earthmaker and preparing the world for the ambiguity and almostinfinite potential inherent in human experience. Eventually, and alwaysimplicitly, everything becomes akin to Trickster and related through him. Allhis companions become his “little brothers,” and he becomes their “bigbrother.”

Trickster is often called the “Foolish One” because he/she inverts and per-verts the separateness of all things, revealing previously undisclosed (or hid-den) relations. She/he not only inverts the order of the world but also theorder of her/his own being through transgendering, for example, or havinghis gigantic penis gnawed down to the present size of the human penis. He/she juggles ordered arrangements and creates new ones. His/her exploitsconstitute a politics of irony in which semantic and pragmatic potentialskaleid6 to reveal deeper though less stable forms of meaning and practice. Theresult is both ludicrous and deadly serious, for Trickster visits a de-creativewasteland and leaves it in a wake of semantic and pragmatic overlap, contra-riety, paradox, and confusion. Temporal sequence is ruptured. Trickster, whobegins the cycle as a chief, becomes a perpetual nomad. There is no distinctionbetween identity and difference. Trickster’s right arm fights with his left. Heeven eats his own intestines, thinking that they are pieces of an animal thatsomeone else must have been carrying and dropped to the ground. Experi-ence and meaning are always suspense-fully oblique because they are sofecund. Trickster is the dialogic meeting ground of coincidence, purpose, andthe separated existents of Earthmaker’s creation. As such, he/she must beboth ambivalent and ambiguous. “Correctly, indeed, am I named FoolishOne, Trickster! By their calling me thus, they have at last actually turned meinto a Foolish One, a Trickster” (Radin, 1956, p. 18). As such, Trickster is nolonger governed by the wakeful sobriety that Nietzsche (1879/1986) insistedforever occludes access to the powerful yet frightening depths of humanunderstanding and dampens the human imagination. In Trickster’s primor-dial world, it is foolish to be wise and wise to be foolish and playful. We canoften not discern who Trickster is until he/she reveals herself/himself inlaughter. All his/her disclosures are likewise disguises and vice versa. Fromthe point of view of her/his peers, she/he is indeed a “tricky one,” a “FoolishOne.” From the perspective of the Winnebago people, he/she is manythings—a cunning hero who snatches living defeat from the jaws of static vic-tory, a tricker who is even more cruelly tricked, a savior, a shape-shifter, a sha-man, a situation inverter, a creator, a destroyer (Radin, 1948). For my purposehere, perhaps the most important characteristic of Trickster is the fact thatshe/he repeatedly salvages creativity and dynamism from the inertia ofEarthmaker’s creation. A short digression into the Earthmaker creation mythwill illustrate what I mean here:7




What it was our father, Earthmaker, lay upon as he came to consciousness, we donot know. Tears flowed from his eyes and fell below him. He lay there motion-less. He saw nothing. Nothing existed in the world. Now, he began to move, hisright arm first, then his left, then his right foot and then his left. His eyes wereopen and he turned on his side and looked below him, far down from where helay. There, far below him, he noticed something bright and shining. Those werehis tears and they had formed the waters of the earth. As he lay there stretchedout, he kept thinking and thinking. “Unbeknown to me, without my intention,my tears as they fell below formed bodies of water. Perhaps now, if I reallyintend something, if I really wish something, it will come into existence just asthe waters were formed of my tears, by themselves.”

Thereupon he stretched out his hand and seized a portion of that upon whichhe was lying and sent it hurtling down below him. . . . The something he hadthrown down slowly assumed the appearance of this earth of ours. But nothinggrew on it. It was without covering of any kind. Moreover, it kept spinningaround continuously. Never was it quiet. . . .

He took a weed-like object from that on which he lay, changed it into grass,and sent it hurtling down to earth. Yet the earth kept spinning and was notquiet. . . . So he took a tree and sent it hurtling down. . . . The earth remained thesame: it was still spinning around. . . . So he took four male-beings, brothers, andplaced one in the east, one in the north, one in the south, and one in the west. Stillthe earth was spinning. Then, he made with his own hands, the four beings thatwe call water spirits, and he placed them under the earth. Finally, he scatteredfemale being over the earth. By female being we mean stones and rocks. At lastthe earth had become quiet. . . . Now he had made the rocks go right through theearth, from one end to the other, and he had left their tops uncovered. All thebirds, animals, and sea creatures he placed in lodges specially provided forthem. And then, at the very end of his thoughts, he made us, man. We were noteven equal in strength to a fly, the weakest of all things created by Earthmaker.As such, we were soon at the point of being destroyed by evil ones. So he formeda being just like ourselves, and when he finished him, he called him Trickster,Foolish One. “Go to earth and put things aright,” he told him. Yet when Trickstercame to earth he did not do as he had been told. He just roamed around andaccomplished absolutely nothing. In fact, he injured some of the creations ofEarthmaker.

The story continues, dealing in turn with each of the Winnebago mythicalheroes: Turtle, Bladder, Red Horn, Hare, and the Twins. Many important con-ceptions about the world arise in this story. Some of them will figure into mylater analysis of Trickster. It is interesting to note that the world’s beginningwas unintentional, an act of discovery, of self-organizing creativity. It alsobegan with tears—the dark and unknown tears of sleep. The awakening ofEarthmaker’s consciousness entails the spiritual powers of memory, the con-centration of thought, and intention. The earth began as a space between two-worlds, a neither/both space constituted at the intersection of stasis and creativeactivity but belonging to neither.

As well as one can surmise, quietude precedes existence. Existence resultsfrom Earthmaker’s unintentional activity and subsequent discovery. Inten-tion potential is part of this original form of existence. At first, Earthmakerseems to intend something, but he is not sure just what. “Let’s see what hap-




pens if I hurl something down,” he says to himself. Through his unintentionalabductive acts, he starts things spinning, but he doesn’t seem to like what hestarted. He fails in various attempts to reinstate quietude. Finally, he succeedswhen he scatters female beings—which are rocks and stones—over the earth.Previously, he had staked out the four “directions” with male beings. The sex-uality of creation is thus neatly polarized. There is not the least suggestion ofsexual tension, union, fertility, or progeny. Instead, all the sexual elements areset off from one another in an attempt to restore equilibrium through separa-tion. The subaltern is assigned its place. Motion is suppressed through equi-librium, and stasis is reinstated through the suppression of motion. Manycreatures are assigned to separate lodges. Birds do not fly through the skies;fish do not swim in the sea; animals do not roam the earth. Stasis reigns. Thedynamism of Earthmaker’s creative activity is over, at least for a while. Forinto this static world of isolated parts comes Trickster.8

In his/her wanderings, Trickster embodies a number of transformativetropes. In keeping with her/his paradoxical nature, these are all double-entendres that carry both positive and negative valences. The most importantof these tropes are ingestion, elimination, sex, and song, which I turn to next.

Ingestion

Hunger is the motivational thrust of many of Trickster’s actions. Trickstereats all possible kinds of plants and animals, including himself/herself. He/she also cons many of his “little brothers and sisters” into helping her/himprocure and prepare large quantities of food for his family. In fact, several epi-sodes late in the cycle (Episodes 41-44) all revolve around this theme. First,Trickster convinces the muskrat to make him huge amounts of rich lily-of-the-lake root soup so that he may feed his family with it for some time. When thisfood is depleted, he cons the snipe into catching him a large supply of fishthrough hypnotism. When the fish have been eaten, Trickster talks the wood-pecker into furnishing his family with large quantities of bear meat. When thebear meat is all gone, Trickster convinces the polecat to kill a winter’s supplyof deer for him and his family. In all of these episodes, Trickster uses hisknowledge and his cunning to ensure that he, his family, and his friendsalways have enough to eat.

There are also many episodes in the cycle in which Trickster uses disguiseand deceit to obtain food for himself/herself only to have it eaten by others orto have some other unanticipated tragedy occur. In Episodes 12 through 14,for example, Trickster catches and kills some ducks through trickery. Becausehe is very tired, he sleeps while the ducks are roasting, instructing his anus toguard them. Although his anus tries valiantly to guard them, it fails, and theducks are eaten by some foxes who are passing by. Trickster then punishes hisanus by burning its mouth with a stick from the fire. As he is walking away, he




notices a trail of fat on the ground that he suspects was left by someone carry-ing a freshly killed animal. He picks up some of the fat and eats it. It has a deli-cious taste, so he eats more. Eventually, he discovers that the fat is part of hisown intestines, which are falling out of his wounded anus. To prevent furtherself-destruction, he ties his intestines together. “That is why the anus ofhuman beings has its present shape” (Radin, 1956, p 18).

In the sixth through eighth episodes, Trickster meets a man who showshim how to kill bears by striking knolls with a club. The man invites Tricksterto join him and his four children in a sumptuous meal. Later, Trickster isentrusted with the care of two of these children. The children’s fatherinstructs Trickster not to feed the children more than once a month lest theydie. “Do not change this rule,” he says. “If you change it in any respect, youwill kill them” (Radin, 1956, p. 9). Imagining that the children must be hungrybecause he is so hungry, Trickster feeds them the very next day, and they die.The children’s father appears almost immediately and begins chasing Trick-ster. He chases Trickster all over the whole earth, throwing things at him andswearing that he will catch and kill him. Eventually, Trickster escapes byjumping into the ocean.

In Episodes 23 through 25 of the cycle, Trickster hears someone whisper-ing to him. It is a bulb on a bush who is saying “He who chews me will defe-cate; he will defecate” (Radin, 1956, p. 25). Convinced that consuming thebulb will not have this effect, Trickster eats it. After a long period of explosiveflatulence, Trickster does indeed begin to defecate and ends up buried in apile of his own excrement. Assisted by directions given to him by variouskinds of trees in the forest, Trickster eventually makes his way to a lake wherehe washes himself and his belongings.

As a cultural trope, hunger has not only material but also theoretical orphilosophical meanings. It is not insignificant, for example, that Tricksteroften saves himself by jumping into water. Recall that bodies of water wereoriginally formed by Earthmaker’s unintended tears and constituted form-less gulfs that separated male beings from the stone and rock of femalebeings. Positivism. Structuralism. In Trickster’s refashioning of the world,bodies of water have become dynamic, life giving, sacred.

In addition, Trickster’s appetite unifies many different worlds into a com-mon whole: eating and being eaten. Hunger drives Trickster to consumeother worlds and to experience contact with different modes of being bydevouring them. Yet because Trickster epitomizes paradox, there is a catch. Ifall worlds are eaten worlds, they must also be eating worlds. Because Trick-ster is the symbolic language and locus of these relational events, he ends upeating his own intestines, thus expressing a theme that is common in manyindigenous cultural systems—all things are transformed, related, and com-mune in being through the same passage—the mouth. The world feeds onitself in an endless chain of consumption, and the waste of consumption feedsthe production of new consumables.9




Hunger has sacred import as well. One hungers not simply for corporealnourishment but also for modes of being other than one’s own: animal, super-natural, powerful, immortal. One also hungers for nourishment of the spirit,for connection with the sacred. Hunger drives toward completeness, omni-science, the dissolution of subject-object dichotomies, and renewal. Hun-ger—the drive to devour, to incorporate everything into the self—paradoxi-cally results in an eclipse of self through the production of a self that is “inharmony with our brothers and sisters, and with all the other spirits of theUniverse” (Storm, 1972, p. 5).

Elimination

Trickster’s anus is another passage that relates all existents. As I noted ear-lier, in the 23rd episode, Trickster eats a plant that causes him to fart uncon-trollably. The plant has warned him of the consequences, yet defiant Tricksterhas not listened. In an attempt to keep himself from being blown away, Trick-ster runs to a nearby village and declares, “Say, hurry up and take your lodgedown, for a big war party is upon you and you will surely be killed!” (Radin,1956, p. 26). The people of a village oblige. They take down their lodge andpile it on Trickster’s back. They also pile all their little dogs on him, and thenthey get on top of him themselves. Just then he begins to break wind again,and the force of the expulsion scatters the things on top of him in all direc-tions. They fall apart from one another. Separated, the people are standingabout shouting to one another; and the dogs, scattered here and there, arehowling at one another. In the midst of it all stands Trickster, laughing at themuntil he aches (Radin, 1956).10 With Trickster farting and laughing, with dogsyapping, and with people shouting at each other, this event poses a sharp con-trast to the quiet world created by Earthmaker. It is a world that is dynamicand alive; its creatures are interacting with each other; there is a productivetension between the differentiated and the not or not yet differentiated. Trick-ster stands as a fecund source of cultural reflection and critical reflexivity thatleaves one thoughtful yet laughing. And as Kristeva (1974/1984) and othersnoted, how laughter figures into the workings of a culture is an index of itsvitality, flexibility, and creativity.

In Episodes 35 and 36 of the cycle, Trickster disguises himself as a deadbuck and traps a hawk in his rectum. A bear finds this plumage stunning andis envious. Trickster loosens his hold on the hawk; there is an odor of foul air;and the hawk reemerges featherless. Trickster then offers to prepare thebear’s rectum for similar adornment. He cuts out Bear’s anus, pulls out hisintestines, and devours the creature.

When interpreted literally or materially, these episodes index the fact thatliving beings not only consume the things of the world but ironically, also dis-charge life to others in the form of carrion, waste, and fertile decayed matter.




All worlds, then, are open to consumption, and consumption is essential tothe perpetual generation of new life, new worlds.

When elevated to the level of their symbolic import, Trickster’s apparentlyvulgar Rabelaisan exploits index the dynamic and powerful potentials ofhuman understanding and inquiry—potentials that are often occluded byreceived cultural (and scientific) traditions with their tendencies to privilegethe singular, the static, and the centripetal. In the Trickster cycle, themes ofingestion and elimination exist on such a symbolic level. The cycle of foodconsumption provides access to all that is “other” through the mouth. Thecycle of waste, associated with the anus, produces transformations to andfrom “other” worlds—plant, animal, mineral, and the world of metamorpho-sis itself. Trickster functions here as discursive and material abduction(Bateson, 1972, 1980; Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931-1935). He/she embodies/reflects the human capacity to create abductive practices and abductive textsat the margins of culturally contrived/inscribed boundaries. Wherever cul-ture has drawn a line or erected a border, Trickster crosses it or tests its limits.

Through this capacity, the apparent unity of the Cartesian subject isdecentered,

expended, expending, irreducible to knowledge, “bordered” by laughter, eroti-cism, or what has been called the “sacred.” . . . In this moment of heterogeneouscontradiction, the subject breaks through his/her unifying enclosure and,through a leap (laughter? fiction?) passes into the process of social change thatmoves through him. (Kristeva, 1974/1984, pp. 204-205)

The pleasure and power of Trickster lies in her/his disruption of “normal”perception and action. Trickster is a disorienting and a reorienting figure whourges us to see and act differently, to avoid the seductive comforts of valida-tion (validity), and to explore the less comfortable realm of possibility not yetvalidated. His/her generativity is “base” and “primitive” not so much in thesense that it is crude as in the sense that it comes from an undifferentiatedliminality, marginalized possibility, possibility at the margins.

Yet, Trickster always runs the risk of overtransforming and overunifyingthings. In him/her, the contrary processes of ingestion and elimination, alongwith the body parts associated with them, are brought into conjunction andseem to be a singular process. As I mentioned in the section on ingestion, forexample, Trickster even consumes his own intestines. In the trade for lifebrought on by cooked food and the consumption of other beings, Tricksterinitiates another cycle that belongs dialogically within the same logic—therottenness and decay of death—which suggests that there are limits to thetransformative unity that both social practices and meaning systems will tol-erate. The contemplation of such limits can be explored through the use ofludicrous irony, but even this approaches dangerous absurdity and nonsense.Trickster is nevertheless a symbol for life as it is lived, and the fundamentalimportance of this symbol is that it indexes dialogue and creativity as central




tropes of human existence. As is true of all dialogic and emergent forms andformations of life, outcomes are never guaranteed in advance. What we imag-ine to be new and productive practices and meanings may become co-optedwithin more traditional agendas, or they may produce unimagined and unin-tended effects such as derailed agendas or even harm to those we had hopedto help. In this regard, Bakhtin (1975/1981) made a crucial distinctionbetween dialogic and dialectic. Dialectic is the master Western trope of synthe-sizing opposites through the abolition of difference. In contrast, dialogue isthe process of continually accommodating opposites under the sign of a com-plex and perhaps contradictory heterogeneous whole. Dialectic is abstract, apriori logical, unidirectional, and finalizable. Dialogue is concrete, genera-tive, multidirectional, and unfinalizable.11 It is thus wonderful, contingent,and even dangerous all at once.

Song

Even the most cursory reading of the Trickster cycle collected by PaulRadin reveals that Trickster is a musician of exceptional power. Surprisingly,this theme is all but absent in the analyses provided by many scholars, includ-ing Jung (1956) and Kerényi (1956). The Winnebago people consider songs aninheritance passed down as powerful gifts within clans and religious societ-ies, and they associate song with intense moments of spiritual awakening andconversion (Radin, 1970). Songs are not idle melodies but sacred artifacts,embodiments of spiritual power. Trickster’s powerful singing becomes espe-cially important when we consider it in relation to the static, quiet world ofEarthmaker’s creation. Song both celebrates and integrates the world. Thehuman voice brings beings into contact with one another, and it disclosesbeing itself when the imagination composes itself in musical artistry. Songsare sacred events, and they cultivate wholeness. Thus, Trickster is not somuch a sacred being here as an expression of the way that the whole universemay become meaningful, sacred, and filled with power.

In several episodes of the myth cycle, Trickster is portrayed as a kind ofminstrel-bricoleur-spirit master. In the 12th through 14th episodes, for exam-ple, he is walking along a lake ostentatiously carrying a large pack on hisback. When a group of ducks asks him what he is carrying, he replies:

Why, I am carrying songs. My stomach is full of bad songs. Some of these mystomach could not hold and that is why I am carrying them on my back. It is along time since I sang any of them. (Radin, 1956, p. 14)

The ducks ask him to sing some songs so that they might dance. “We havebeen yearning to dance for some time, but could not do so because we had nosongs” (p. 15). What follows is an episode known throughout North Americaas “the hoodwinked dancers.” Trickster convinces the ducks to dance with




their eyes closed to prevent their eyes from turning red. As they dance, hewrings the necks of some of the ducks, which he will later eat. This continuesuntil one duck thinks that some of the quacks he is hearing sound macabre,exposes Trickster, and warns the remainder of the group who then run away.

Trickster’s songs, which are often accompanied by dance, contribute in avariety of ways to disrupting and reorganizing the structure of the world.Importantly, they are stored on his back, which is also where he stores hisenormous coiled penis and where shamans store their medicine chests. All ofthese artifacts are sacred in one way or another, and all are powerful forcescapable of creativity and destruction. Similar to all forms of power, the powerof song is constituted at the intersection of positive and negative potentials.Life and the threat of death collide. As nonrepresentational forces, song andother instruments of power have no guaranteed outcomes. For example, afterTrickster hoodwinked and killed several ducks with song, he started a fireand began roasting them. While they were cooking, however, Trickster fellasleep, and the ducks were eaten by some foxes who happened to be passingby.

Song figures prominently in a number of other episodes of the WinnebagoTrickster cycle as well. However, because I analyze these episodes for otherpurposes in the following section and because I address the constitutivepower of song in these analyses, I will not repeat them here.

Sex

Although his penis is one of Trickster’s more prominent features, it isunlikely that it represents his exclusively male sexuality. Indeed, Trickster’ssometimes female genitals seem to function in the same ways as his male gen-itals, to disrupt the status quo and to redistribute power more equally, forexample. Thus, Trickster’s penis seems more an index of transformativepotential than a phallus. This is perhaps why Trickster manages to maintain aspirit of extreme detachment toward it. He carries it in a box on his back; hesends it across a river; he stuffs it into a tree, where most of it gets gnawed offby a chipmunk; he tosses the pieces that remain into a lake where they aretransformed into food plants. Importantly, the water that once separatedmale and female beings and negated the earth’s potential generativity nowcombines with the remains of Trickster’s penis to give life to the creatures ofthe sacred earth.

With respect to sexuality, then, Trickster is both male and female. He per-forms sexually as a man. She also performs as a woman, not simply in trans-vestite disguise but actually conceiving and giving birth. In the 16th episode,Trickster’s penis is the central protagonist. Trickster sees a group of women,including the chief’s daughter, on the other side of a lake he has come upon.He decides he would like to have intercourse. Standing at the edge of the lake,




Trickster removes his coiled penis from its box and sends it across the lake.12

Although he implores it not to make waves, his penis apparently has a mindof its own and moves swiftly and noisily across the lake. Trickster decides itneeds some ballast. After several attempts, he finds the proper size rock forballast, ties it to his penis, and sends it on its way. It goes directly to the desig-nated spot and lodges firmly in the chief’s daughter’s vagina. In Arthurianfashion, many people, including the village’s strongest men, are unsuccessfulin their attempts to dislodge Trickster’s penis. Eventually, they seek out awise old woman to do the job. She recognizes Trickster, reprimands thewould-be knights for annoying the chief’s daughter while she was enjoyingsex, and removes Trickster’s penis with an awl and a song. Again, the powerof song functions as an instrument of praxis. Importantly and paradoxically,however, the old woman also takes care to point out the value of pleasure andthe creative potential of intercourse.

This episode has received much attention. All interpretations of which Iam aware have rendered it proof of the importance of sexuality in individualpsychological development (e.g., Piper, 1975; Radin, 1956). However, I thinkit is crucial not to limit the significance of this episode to physical sexualbehavior, to the sexual conditions of humans, to the importance of sexualityin psychological development, or even to the purpose and functioning ofsocial taboos. In keeping with his/her transformative nature, Trickster’spenis crosses the great divide between male and female being. InEarthmaker’s world, the four male beings set at the earth’s four compasspoints and the scattered female beings of rock and stone are separate andunrelated—not only physically but interpretively as well. They belong to dif-ferent semantic and pragmatic planes sharing no common meaning and nophysical contact.

How might these two planes, which intersect at no point, be related? Trick-ster’s penis seems to be the answer. Relative to most everyday interpretivelogics, his penis is grossly out of context. It is puzzling, and the intrigue ofpuzzlement gives one pause. James (1950) referred to such processes of mon-strous symbolism as “consecutive discordance,” a dream-like process ofimaginative abstraction. Bateson (1972) and Peirce (Hartshorne & Weiss,1931-1935) referred to them as processes of abduction. In and through Trick-ster’s penis, a connection is made across an irreconcilable divide of male andfemale being that has existed since creation as a formless and unrelated gulf.A cultural connection is made as well. The penis portrays the very processand dynamics of cultural imagination, which is always poking into placesthat are not its own. It creates new practices and new meanings by relatingdiscordant forms and transcending the formless gulfs between them.

In the episodes that Paul Radin referred to as the most crucial episodes inthe cycle (Episodes 19 through 22), Trickster becomes a woman. Probablymore than all others, these episodes highlight the counterhegemonic, multi-




ple, and emancipatory dimensions of Trickster that I have treated earlier andthat I will argue are central to the possible modes of human understandingand inquiry that Trickster both indexes and urges. In these crucial episodes,Trickster becomes a woman to save himself and his companions from freez-ing and starving during the harsh winter. He fashions a vulva from an elkliver and breasts from elk kidneys, and he transforms himself into a beautifulwoman. In this disguise, she visits a nearby village with the intent of marry-ing the chief’s son, who she knows is looking for a wife. They are married, andTrickster gives birth to several children, the last of whom cries incessantly anddemands to play with unattainable objects—a white cloud, blue sky, ears ofcorn for roasting, green leaves. A shaman is summoned and manages in vari-ous ways to satisfy the child’s desires. Later in the year, the chief’s wife isfighting with her sister-in-law while roasting corn. Annoyed by the fighting,Trickster “jumps over the roasting pit and drops something very rotten.” It isthe vulva fashioned earlier from an elk liver. The people shout: “It is Trick-ster!” All the men are ashamed, especially the chief’s son. Knowing the jig isup, Trickster and his/her companions all run away. But winter is now over,and Trickster has managed to save himself/herself and her/his friends.

In this story, Trickster intentionally makes himself into a woman. This actparodies Earthmaker’s unintentional fashioning of the world, and it stands insharp contrast to Trickster’s unintentional male sexuality replete with a dis-embodied penis about which he usually appears indifferent. Nevertheless,Trickster is a woman. Yet, as Radin (1956) pointed out, Trickster’s character isnever dependent on the form he/she assumes but on the nature of his/herexploits. Trickster is a complexly and self-organizing patterned set ofevents—improvisation, pastiche, montage, pentimento. Together, theseevents relate things that appear on the surface to have no common ground.They transform apparent nonrelatedness into increasingly larger wholes ofmeaning by progressively reducing the importance of boundary and form. Interms of the mythic imagination, Trickster is a locus in primordial space andtime where separated worlds interpenetrate. In Trickster’s being, things arenot only related but pass through each other. Trickster is a dialogic referentwho holds together many opposites, allows dialogue among them, and thusenables and celebrates heteroglossic and paradoxical meanings.

Importantly, Trickster’s body is the medium through which the events inthe myth take place. Transformation through the interpenetration of materialand interpretive worlds, as well as through cosmic disruption and metamor-phosis, are all linked within the imaginary of the body. The body becomes amaterial/symbolic template that reveals the potentials and limitations ofhuman existence. In fashioning female parts from a living animal, Tricksteracts creatively and in stark contrast to Earthmaker, who had fashioned femalebeings as rock and stone. Although it is immortally durable, stone cannot pro-duce new life. Moreover, the vulva typifies Trickster’s creative exploits,




being, as it is, a locus of passage to undisclosed worlds of interaction, dia-logue, and generativity. It generates life itself, which is ironically subject torottenness, decay, and death. At the end of this sequence of crucial episodes,when Trickster drops her rotting vulva, it becomes clear that she has paid theprice for a durable diet of food and meaning. In fashioning female parts fromliving flesh, Trickster has traded the durable life of stone—the life of de-creation—for the contingent life of growth, decay, and death—the life of cre-ation. Yet, as the referent for opposites, Trickster really maintains both, reveal-ing to us the depths of human experience and understanding, which entailcontinuance and change, pleasure and pain, creation and destruction. At theirvery core, human experience and human understanding are paradoxical. Asexemplified most notably in Nietzsche’s (1872/2000) treatment of Dionysusand Apollo, what is most beautiful and creative is also most fragile and con-tingent. In her/his transformations and wanderings, Trickster embodies thisparadox. Without foundational moorings, she/he is capable of infinite andcontradictory acts and meanings. Ironically, for understanding the contin-gent, nonsynchronous, and discontinuous nature of human existence, he/shepays the price of pain and terror. Knowledge through suffering is always alsosuffering through knowledge. It is interesting to note that at the end of theTrickster as woman episodes, Trickster runs away without looking back andimmediately returns to his wife and family where he is welcomed by hisfather-in-law and remains until his son is full grown. This mention of his fam-ily, by the way, is the first of its kind in the myth cycle. Whatever Trickster real-izes in the moment preceding his flight must be horribly frightening. In allother similar episodes of trickery, Trickster responds to being found out withlaughter, and the only pain he feels is that of his aching sides.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT: SILLY RABBIT,TROPES ARE FOR KIDS

Far from respecting the axial worlds of analogy, metaphor, and metonym,Trickster’s language, character, and exploits are shot through with anotherimportant but underestimated trope: irony. Irony binds apparent oppositesinto a single figure so that these contraries somehow appear to belongtogether. It is akin to dialogics in that it creates newer and larger schemes inwhich opposites can be accommodated and, in fact, related by the schemes. InTrickster, chaos and order, sacred and profane, food and waste, silence andsong, farce and meaning, stone life and flesh life, male and female, ignoranceand cunning, pleasure and pain, real and imaginary all constitute not onlyironic symbols but also symbols of irony.

Trickster’s character and exploits embody the process of the ironic imagi-nation. His/her dynamism of composition mocks, shatters, and re-forms the




overcoded structures of Winnebago culture and their limited visions ofhuman existence. Trickster literally subverts the seemingly inescapable struc-ture of Earthmaker’s reality and the imperialism of Earthmaker’s attitudetoward reality. He/she is all ingestion, elimination, sex, and song whose self-organizing mode of existence devours antagonisms, scatters waste across thevisible landscape, explores passages, and offers access to one oppositethrough another in disharmonious sonority. In and through her/his ironicactivities, the dynamic and multiple possibilities of human reality are dis-closed. In both imagining and embodying the meeting of all contraries, Trick-ster’s ironic character articulates the human imagination as the dialogic sitethat produces human meanings, especially aesthetic meanings, marked asthey are by nonrepresentation, overflow, and surplus. Trickster makes us feelthe fullness and richness of life that is only possible through living creativelyand imaginatively, with all the risks and dangers that entails. Trickster’s stu-pidity, untruthfulness, and pretensions not to know constitute a nonsenseframe that is generative of every possible sense, an illusion generative ofevery possible reality. In his/her lusty, voracious, flatulent way, Tricksteroffers us a lens for glimpsing deeper and more generative realities than theones typically made available through the lenses of received traditions andstatic representations. He/she allows us access into ostensibly hidden,unreachable, untouchable, elusive domains, and she/he urges us to refuse toreduce these domains to taken-for-granted cultural representations. Tricksteroffers us tools not for accepting and representing our cultural imaginaries butfor producing them.

UNDERSTANDING TRICKSTER/TRICKSTERING UNDERSTANDING

Myths of anomaly such as the Trickster myth are both for finding thingsout and for transforming the ways things are.13 In this sense, they are materialfictions that constitute the cultural imaginaries for envisaging possibleworlds and possible selves.14 Myths are originative and generative, and theirboundaries are fluid. They enact a re-genesis that makes for ongoing creativeprocesses, and they nourish the human capacity for experiencing, producing,and surviving novelty and change. Myths modify attitudes toward static sys-tems—social, scientific, cultural, or otherwise—and thus also modify theways they can function in relation to actual human lives. Myths are concernednot so much with ends that shape as with beginnings that are situated some-where outside extant material fictions. They are concerned with possiblerather than actual (read: ossified) visions of human existence. Myths are, inshort, nonrepresentational, praxis-oriented, dialogic cultural tools. They




embody radically unshaped but protean forces that function to produce new,more morally sound, more aesthetically rich, and more sacred realities.

As such a cultural tool, Trickster is the creative first moment in theWinnebago imaginary and the source from which all future moments flow.Similar to Trickster, the kind of productive understanding she/he indexesmust dissolve customary boundaries and create new alignments. It mustresist current representations, which are always constrained by normalizedtraditions and practices; it must disrupt neatly striated surfaces; it must pro-duce new assemblages of practices and meanings; and it must work to restorethe sacred wholeness that is fundamental to individuals and to the world.

From this perspective, the reality and the meaning of Trickster is always ananomalous set of comportments—such as cunning and stupidity, creativityand destructiveness, secular and sacred—that seem mutually exclusivebased on both deductive and inductive logics but make perfect sense accord-ing to abductive ones. It is Trickster’s genius to recombine the exclusive andthus to put us in touch with the creative, moral, and sacred dimensions of ourexistence. For if there are motives underlying Trickster’s deceptions, roles,and exploits, they are merely counters used to produce powerful sets of dis-cursive/material forces that effectively both affirm his/her existence anddeny it in the ever-present thrust for re-creation, for disclosing/producing abetter, more just, more sacred reality.

As embodied, dialogic, abductive praxis rooted in unformed but familiardarkness and disorder, Trickster represents the ever-present surplus of possi-bility inherent in human existence that makes for change and exchange. Assuch, he/she mirrors the kinds of transactions that constitute rearticulationsof both our lived and our material realities. The translation from one form oflife to another is possible only through the self-organizing processes con-noted by the words change and exchange. This does not dissolve the distinc-tions between myth and life, however. Clearly, each is a separate enterprise,but Trickster shows us that myth and life are not mutually exclusive. Eachshares in the dark and silent yet familiar realm of human beginnings that isever present in excess and that, although it cries out for meaning, also defiesstatic social facts by producing new realities with different social facts. Exis-tence itself is enabled by its ability to disarticulate and rearticulate the veryconditions that constitute it.

Trickster, then, is the sleeping partner of the human imagination, a criticalpreliminary who evokes guardian axioms that disclose possibilities for inter-vening into and thus changing reality itself (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987).He/she forever resists the temptations of dogma intrinsic to any naturalizedreality. With Trickster as a guide, then, we might hope to escape the dangers ofblindness and reification that are part and parcel of our ties to tradition. If wedo escape, it will be a virtue borrowed from reality itself; it will be because wesucceeded in engaging in a transformative dialogue with reality throughabductive praxis. For Trickster is the being of ways and passages. All of her/




his ways have to do with interfaces, mediations, and incongruous affiliations.Or, they have to do with boundaries, divisions, and contradictory juxtaposi-tions but in a most curious way. In relation to this latter construal, Trickster’sways index a whole range of relational ideas connoted by the notion of aboundary line. So, although emphasis in a given episode may be either ondividing or conjoining, Trickster always embodies both. She/he is messenger,mediator, and psycho-pomp, “the hoverer-between-worlds who dwells in aworld of his own” (Kerényi, 1956, p. 189).

Always straddling opposites, Trickster embodies paradoxical andabductive modes of human experience, understanding, and action. On theone hand, he/she is a force of disorder that outrages and disrupts. On theother hand, she/he embodies an unanticipated and contingent benevolencein which trickery almost always manages to benefit humankind. These anti-thetical experiences are often fused into a single act or episode. Recall, forexample, that when Trickster’s penis is destroyed by a chipmunk, he uses thegnawed off pieces to create food plants for the world’s living creatures. Andafter he tricks a group of people into freeing his head from an elk’s skull,where it had gotten stuck while he was playing with some flies, Trickstergives them the skull and its contents from which they make various effica-cious medicines.

Operating at those extremes of existence that are almost impossible to rec-ognize within normalized cultural systems, Trickster—at once bestial anddivine, cunning and stupid—embodies a range of shadowy, baffling possibil-ities for self and world, from the subhuman to the superhuman and from thesuper blatant to the super subtle. He/she is a profoundly fascinating figure,abrogating as she/he does in her/his tricks and self-deceptions all restric-tions, rules, and taboos; manipulating the untouchable; and freely tappingthe powers of political activity by means of illusion, metamorphosis, and dia-logue. Importantly here, almost all his/her tricks function in positive ways—to shame others who have tricked him and thus negate the trickery, to extri-cate herself/himself from some entanglement he/she has gotten himself/herself into by his/her playfulness, or to benefit others (and often to save theirlives).

Embodying illusion, metamorphosis, and dialogue, Trickster reminds usthat despite our covering concepts, reality in some ways always eludes usbecause it is forever being produced and not really always-already-there.Despite all our rational systems, reality has a way of revealing to us that it is aculturally constructed imposter. And such revelations almost always comefrom the margins. Indeed, in and through his/her own marginality, Trickstersuggests that marginal human experiences and human experiences of mar-ginality are much more revelatory than we might think.

If we invert a slogan, borrowed from Kermode (1967), that fictions are forfinding things out, we might say that they are also for being found out. Theyallow the possibility of focusing on the reality of human existence, which (a) is




what it is, (b) does what it does, and (c) is as it does despite what we contriveto say about it and do with it. Tricking and being tricked belong to the samecultural logic. Trickster is this logic, which our conceptual strategies oftenobscure, and thus she/he offers us new realities and ways to position our-selves within them. Through Trickster, we are actively found out. Better still,we find ourselves out. Far from merely representing an objective grid of real-ity, Trickster’s logic enables us to create and re-create the grid of reality wewander across.

Human understanding and inquiry, then, are always a matter of self-understanding and self-production. They are transformative, dialogic, andgenerative, more like Trickster’s fabricated elk-liver vulva than the vulva ofthe chief’s daughter, a static stone receptacle that holds Trickster’s penis firmand spoils all the pleasure. We should recall, however, that there is a price tobe paid, albeit a different price in each case, for both static and dynamicmodes of existence. The price for static modes is inertia, a state where nothinghappens and nothing is learned. The price for dynamic modes is activity andchange, which may include decay and death. We should also recall here thateach mode of existence has its own rewards. The rewards for static modes ofexistence are stability, familiarity, and comfort; the rewards for dynamicmodes are generativity, novelty, and becoming—the disarticulation andrearticulation of reality.

The vision of human activity indexed by Trickster is not unlike the pro-cesses of community renewal analyzed by Turner (1967). In Turner’s analysis,renewal is rooted in a liminal state that summons up deeply hidden culturalfirst principles by abrogating everyday life patterns. In doing so, this processof renewal reactivates the sense of communitas, the ideal social sharing of com-mon values, regard for one another, and the celebration of communal life.“Communitas breaks in through the interstices of structure, in liminality; at theedges of structure, in marginality; and from beneath structure, in inferiority”(Turner, 1969, p. 128). Communitas is freedom coexisting within structure inways that disrupt and dissolve the norms that govern structured and institu-tionalized relationships and make way for potent forms of social critique andtransformation. Turner goes on to link communitas with wisdom. Wisdom isthe achievement of balanced productive relations between communitas andstructure within any specific situated social field. Communitas is thus amoment of renewal and transformation, not a permanent condition. It is pos-sibility in dialogue with reality.

The interpersonal and intercommunal behavior of Trickster, in which thevery elements of mutual human faith, understanding, and cooperation areprecariously at stake yet always affirmed, is an archetypal token of thisliminal state. Thus, Trickster can be seen both as a point of departure and away of proceeding that produce new assemblages composed of any numberof apparent oppositions or anomalies.




Liminality is indeed at the core of the imagery of food and waste in theTrickster myth cycle. The disruptive activities and nonrepresentationalmeaning-making processes I have described throughout this article are notunlike the endless chains of consumption, transformation, and regenerationdescribed in the myth cycle. Liminality is also at the heart of both Ricoeur’s(1976) and Taylor’s (1979) insistence that human understanding is always amatter of transformation and self-transformation. Linking the idea that Trick-ster is embodied abductive praxis with Ricoeur and Taylor’s theoreticalaccounts of understanding and interpretation and Turner’s (1967, 1969)insights about the nature and function of liminality, I would like to suggestthat liminal modes of being articulate a kind of neither/both logic. Such alogic is radically different from an either/or logic, as in either good or evil,and significantly different from a both/and logic, which implies the possibil-ity of resolution and hence reduces a tension that is simultaneously vital, elu-sive, and fertile. Embodying this neither/both logic, Trickster maps a marginor a boundary that is both composed of multiple worlds of practice and mean-ing but is really and completely neither of them. As an embodied mode ofneither/both thinking, acting, and being, Trickster gives us yet another wayto understand this idea. Trickster’s liminal nature and antics do not so muchsynthesize oppositions as serve as referents for them. In other words, she/heis a means for identifying and, more important, experiencing the elusive full-ness of a life worth living.

In this regard, Trickster is a lot like Socrates in Plato’s (Hamilton & Cairns,1961) Phaedrus and Symposium. Recall that Socrates was not merely the masterdialectician revealing and reconciling opposites in these dialogues. He wasalso the ironic and ugly yet internally beautiful and always elusive being ofseveral opposing loves that Alcibiades called the Silenus. Similar to theSilenus, Trickster is a cultural resource for locating (or perhaps more aptly,producing) reality by many and varied vectors. As such, he/she reminds usthat human inquiry and understanding are those refining processes ofthought and action that continually seek to accommodate opposing ideas,propositions, processes, and objects. Such modes of inquiry and understand-ing always seek standpoints from which one may hold contradictions in somekind of dynamic tension or render them as somehow disparate yet connectedparts of a common ground or process.

The kind of human inquiry and understanding indexed by Trickster’sactivities and exploits holds yet another meaning. As an element of a disposi-tion that evades every workable program, the mode of human inquiry andunderstanding implicit in this cultural figure is a kind of confident hesitancy,the prolonged maintenance of an internal space for the love of a premodern/postmodern kind of wisdom that avoids hasty antinomies because it recog-nizes the many, indeed numberless, possible forms of knowing and being thatlie in between or outside of our received systems for thinking, judging, andacting.




REFRAIN: TRICKSTER AS PREMODERN AVATAROF POSTMODERN RESEARCH PRACTICE

I would like to return now to the idea that Trickster is a premodern avatarof postmodern inquiry practice, or what Denzin and Lincoln (2000) referredto as the sixth and seventh moments of qualitative research. And I would liketo do so by returning to Trickster’s imagery. The dominant imagery of colos-sal forms of ingestion, elimination, sex, and song that fills the WinnebagoTrickster tales may be read as comic, transvalued figures for nonrepresentational,creative, disruptive, praxis-oriented, and even sacred modes of being, inquir-ing, and understanding. All his/her actions and their effects (and indeedTrickster’s very shape-shifting and situation-inverting being) defy represen-tational epistemologies. She/he is pure generativity, constantly creating cul-ture out of nonculture and nonculture out of culture. Her/his actions arealmost always abductive (Peirce’s [Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931-1935]“Firstness”) rather than inductive (Peirce’s [Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931-1935]“Secondness”) or deductive (Peirce’s [Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931-1935]“Thirdness”), as when Trickster salvages his gnawed up penis by transform-ing it into various food plants of the earth.

This event also indexes Trickster’s moral center and her/his praxis orien-tation. Even when being foolish and deceptive, Trickster’s actions are almostalways directed toward creating benefits for humankind. In addition to creat-ing the food plants of the earth, she/he removes all manner of material hin-drances (e.g., large rocks, waterfalls, and canyons) that would have made lifemore difficult for all Plains Indians. Almost all of the animals that she/he killsand eats are ones that pose threats to humans. And he/she constantly saveshis/her companions from starvation, freezing, and other sure forms of death.

Yet, the effects of Trickster’s actions are always up for grabs. For example,although he feeds the tiny children entrusted to his care because he thinksthey need nourishment, they die as a result. Because praxis fundamentallyinvolves emergent and thus contingent interactions with others, its motiva-tions are always negotiated motivations that may be derailed, that may spinout of control, that may change unwittingly, that may get co-opted, that maythemselves be transgressed, and so on. Although praxis-oriented research is akey imperative for the sixth and seventh moments, Trickster reminds us thatsuch an imperative is neither a natural nor an easily accomplished next step inqualitative inquiry’s great chain of being. As an articulation or a historicallyproduced and nonnecessary relation (Hall, 1986), praxis-oriented research iscontingent, power laden, complex, and self-organizing. As such, it willalways involve—even be constituted by and within—risk and danger. Praxiscomes with no guarantees.

In this regard, truly transformative research will always require attentionnot only to the pragmatic sense of praxis but also to its political sense, whichwas carefully articulated by Gramsci (1948-1951/1971). According to Gramsci’s




notion of praxis, researchers and research participants must enter into recip-rocal relationships wherein common work experience is a venue for bothintellectuals and workers to advance their points of view and interests. Inaddition, the practice pole of the theory-practice dialectic must be understoodas conscious action in pursuit of a common goal. Praxis, therefore, is con-cerned not only with the reciprocity between individuals but with the devel-opment of a political philosophy that commits participants to social change.In this process, collectives seize on experiences and struggles in which thereare still glimmerings of solidarity and the promise of dialogic communities inwhich there can be genuine mutual participation and where reciprocal per-suasion and benefit can occur. In other words, reciprocal relationships mustlead to conscious common goals, and these goals must in some ways expressthe transformative possibilities of a dialogic community. Developing andmaintaining such reciprocal relationships, however, is extraordinarily diffi-cult work, and similar to many of Trickster’s exploits, it can easily go awry.Chief among the reasons why such reciprocity is so difficult is because itrequires being uneasy in one’s skin (Probyn, 1993), and being uneasy in one’sskin demands self-defamiliarization, self-reconstruction, and sometimespainful redistributions of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital(e.g., Bourdieu, 1986).

Foreshadowing the researcher’s modus operandi in the sixth and seventhmoments of qualitative inquiry, Trickster is a consummate bricoleur, alwayscobbling together whatever tools and strategies are ready to hand and seemuseful for solving pressing problems. For example, he convinces a whole vil-lage to pile their lodge and their belongings on his back to prevent himselffrom being hurtled into space from uncontrollable farting. He/she uses songsas instruments of all manner of creation and destruction. He becomes she byfashioning a vulva from elk liver and breasts from elk kidneys to marry achief’s son and thereby save his friends from freezing and starving during thewinter. In and through these activities, the figure of Trickster shapes an imageof human action as that of an imaginatively inspired handyman, cobblingtogether bits and pieces of experience, inquiry, and understanding to makecomplex, multiple, and intersecting discursive-material formations of prac-tice and meaning.

Finally, Trickster’s actions and their effects foreshadow the insistence inthe sixth and seventh moments of qualitative inquiry that the whole universemay be celebrated as meaningful, sacred, and filled with power. Her/his con-sciousness, for example, is embodied, organic, and participatory, and her/hisworld is enchanted, wondrous, and alive. Trickster slips back and forthbetween the sacred and the profane, eventually remaining in charge of aworld between the two. She/he can communicate with all beings—rocks,plants, animals, humans. Trickster’s experiencing, relationships, and actionsalmost always honor life and the earth. He/she is often a savior to her/hisfriends. Trickster recombines mutually exclusive domains and categories set




up by Earthmaker to reveal powerfully dynamic, moral, and sacred dimen-sions of existence. Nearly all her/his acts of ingestion, elimination, sex, andsong restore creation/creativity to the static world left behind by Earthmaker,making it a space of love, mystery, wonder, dialogue, and democratic living.

Importantly, Trickster’s nonrepresentational, creative, disruptive, praxis-oriented, and even sacred modes of being, inquiring, and understanding beara strong family resemblance to the beautiful gods concealed in the grotesquebellies of the Sileni, as well as the powerful yet frightening depths of humanexperience and insight that Nietzsche (1872/2000) claimed bring forthbeauty, clarity, and truth. Trickster herself/himself is a grossly exaggeratedversion of these abductive modes, repeatedly incorporating what is “other”into himself/herself while always remaining distinct from it. In this way, he/she permits us to see, experience, and textualize the interconnections in andamong the real and the possible, which in the course of normal everyday life,we seldom see or experience but are both foundational to life and crucial to alife worth living. In this sense, then, Trickster is a metaphor (metonym?) for adialogic ontology/epistemology nexus. He/she reveals to us the chaotic,dark, and silent yet familiar realm from which multiple possibilities maybecome multiple actualities, though usually in unpredictable, contingent,and ironic ways.

In the end, Trickster is about the generation and regeneration of differenceand relational singularity. For life, there must be death; for self, the other; formeaning, the loss of it. This kind of logic reminds us of Nietzsche’s (1879/1986; 1872/2000) observation that the question of reality has always been thequestion of survival par excellence, and it indexes a premodern/postmodernparadox—that of self-transcendence. Trickster is the paradox of self-transcendence. She/he is quintessentially a liminal creature, always betweentwo worlds and limited to neither. He/she is always self, not self, neither ofthem, and both of them. The value of this multiply laminated paradox withregard to human experience, inquiry, and understanding lies in its warningagainst reification and reductionism. Living beings and living cultures areprocesses that involve straddling the boundaries between our present realtiesand what they (and we) might become. Trickster is the master cultural tropeof these processes: the being of passages who is in passage and throughwhom existence passes. And if an abductive connection between Tricksterand the sixth and seventh moments makes any sense at all, then we too mustbecome her/him for “if we laugh at him, he grins at us. What happens to himhappens to us” (Radin, 1956, p. 169).

NOTES

1. Because Trickster is a consummate shape-shifter—sometimes male, sometimesfemale; sometimes human, sometimes animal—I have adopted the practice in this arti-




cle of varying the pronouns I use to refer to him/her. Whenever I refer to Trickster (orthe Winnebago Trickster) in general, I use the doubled pronoun he/she (or she/he) and itscase-related forms. Whenever I refer to particular actions or episodes in which Trick-ster’s gender is ostensibly nonambiguous, I use pronouns that reflect her or his embod-ied gender at that time.

2. Also worth noting here is the fact that most Trickster myth cycles, and certainlythe Winnebago cycle that I focus on in this article, are themselves open, nonlinear,experimental texts. The episodes may be read in any order without a loss of meaning,and there is no ordering that will result in a single, linear, cohesive, coherent narrative.Whatever the arrangement of episodes, the reader will always be left with disruptions,contradictions, paradoxes, and loose ends.

3. Of these various interpretations, my reading of Trickster accords most closelywith Kristeva’s (1974/1984) argument that Trickster is the embodiment of cultural cre-ativity, Street’s (1972) insight that Trickster represents the delicate balance between cre-ative and destructive impulses, and Pelton’s (1974) insistence that Trickster representsthe sacred potential of human experience and understanding. Although it is beyondthe scope of this article to argue for the ways in which I believe some of these other anal-yses are limited and even misguided, I must note that I take issue with them in seriousways. For example, I disagree with Radin’s (1956) colonialist claim that Trickster repre-sents an important but very primitive stage in the evolutionary development ofhumankind. Similarly, I disagree with Jung’s (1951/1973) claim that Trickster repre-sents a process of psychological development from infantilism to relative maturity.And I think that Girard’s (1972/1977) claim that Trickster is a source of cultural violenceis all but preposterous, akin to similar simplistic reactionary arguments about the rela-tions between television and violence. All of these claims are far too narrow andreductionistic to explain the complexity and nuance of Trickster as a cultural figure andforce. In this regard, all successful analyses of Trickster need to transcend simplistic cat-egories. They need to allow for the flexibility required to confront polarities, dualities,and multiple manifestations. And they need to allow for the complexity required tograpple with the ambiguity, border crossing, paradox, multiplicity, liminality, andinversion that is Trickster.

Also worth noting here is the fact that there has been a long debate about whetherTrickster should be read as a universal human trope or as an overlapping set of culturaltropes that grew out of specific sets of material-historical circumstances. One of themost notable debates in this regard occurred between Stanley Edgar Hyman and RalphEllison. It first appeared in Partisan Review in 1958 and was reprinted in Dundes (1971).In this debate, Hyman argued that the African American tradition of blackface in whichthe central figure is a “smart man playing dumb” is one embodiment of the archetypalTrickster figure found in virtually all folklore and literature the world over. In contrast,Ellison claimed that the “smart man playing dumb” of blackface was a unique responseto the specific historical and social circumstances of violent racism. As such, it was notat all comic. Besides questioning the legitimacy of blackface as an instantiation of Trick-ster, I find the dichotomization underlying debates about the universalism or particularismof Trickster to be problematic. Although I acknowledge the inherent difficulties inspeaking about such a complex figure, I try to chart a course between accounts that ren-der Trickster as so universal that all Tricksters necessarily speak with the same voiceand accounts that insist that each Trickster is a product of such a unique set of social,cultural, and historical circumstances that he/she could not possibly embody the samemeanings and functions as other Tricksters. Indeed, one of the key features of Trickster




is her/his both/and quality or perhaps neither/both quality, as I will argue later. EachTrickster is unique, yet each Trickster bears a family resemblance to other Tricksters,thus inviting us to explore her/his comparative social functions, psychological dynam-ics, literary intertextuality, relationships to the spiritual and the sacred, and ritualtransformations.

4. Abduction is an incredibly complex, controversial human activity that has beenwoefully undertheorized in philosophy, semiotics, and psychology and that I do notpretend to understand with any degree of sophistication. Even so, I will describe it verybriefly here. According to Peirce (Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931-1935), Bateson (1972, 1980),and others, abduction is a particular kind of embodied and distributed human activitythat is extraordinarily creative and synthetic. It seems to involve a person’s or a cul-ture’s whole being—instinct, intuition, sensuality, affect, cognition, and so on. It is anelusive yet intense, synthetic, and often frenzied kind of activity. It is the activity that islargely responsible for artistic creation, scientific discovery, mystical experience, and soon. In this regard, Bateson (1980) argued that metaphors, dreams, parables, allegories,poetry, play, and scientific breakthroughs—indeed, everything creative about art, sci-ence, philosophy, and religion—result from instances of abduction within the humansphere. Peirce noted that “the abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an actof insight . . . it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed ofputting together which flashes the new idea before our contemplation” (Vol. 5, p. 181).

Peirce (Hartshorne & Weiss, 1931-1935) went on to claim that abduction is funda-mental to the processes of inquiry, learning, discovery, and creativity. To explain abduc-tion, Peirce contrasted it with induction and deduction. Any act of inquiry begins withabduction, which is “the only creative act of mind . . . the operation which introducesany new idea” (Vol. 2, p. 624). Then, “induction does nothing but determine a value,and deduction merely evolves the necessary consequences of pure hypothesis” (Vol. 5,p. 517). In this regard, he associated abduction with what he called Firstness, inductionwith what he called Secondness, and deduction with what he called Thirdness. All indi-vidual and cultural discoveries or creations begin with abductions—the assembling ofan almost infinite array of possibilities (Firstness) into some dynamic and inchoatewhole. This inchoate whole is actualized into some kind of general idea (Secondness).Eventually, this general idea congeals into a taken-for-granted generality (Thirdness).Deduction, then, is a process whereby a habit, as the result of abductive and then induc-tive processes, becomes part of everyday life, becomes common cultural sense. Thirdness,however, is only made possible by the prior development of Firstness and Secondness.Imagination made manifest through abduction (Firstness) is the wellspring of thisentire process.

5. All of the descriptions, analyses, and interpretations of Wakdjunkaga that con-stitute the bulk of this article are based on the Trickster cycle collected by Radin andespecially the complete cycle contained in Radin (1956). When I treat particular epi-sodes in detail, I refer to them by number. However, when I treat themes that cut acrossepisodes or when I remark on mere snippets of episodes, I do not provide specific quo-tations or citations.

6. I created this verb—kaleid—from the noun kaleidoscope to connote the complexactivity of shifting, colliding, colluding, collaborating, conspiring, refracting, dispers-ing, and interanimating all at the same time to produce effects that are both real andfictional.




7. What follows is an abridged version of a variant of the creation myth thatappears in Radin (1945, pp. 17-19). Another variant of the myth appears in Radin (1923,pp. 212-213).

8. It takes little or no imagination to map this story of Earthmaker onto positivistepistemologies spawned by the Enlightenment. In both its empiricist and idealist ver-sions, such epistemologies posit a real world independent of experience that is highlystructured and operates according to abstract laws or principles that may be discoveredthrough the use of the “scientific method.” Neither does it take much to imagine thepossible linkages between Trickster and the epistemologies, methods, and practicesunderlying sixth and seventh moment qualitative inquiry.

9. Parenthetically, this perspective is not unlike the indigenous approaches to artdescribed by Clifford (1988). In contrast to Western approaches where art is stored inmuseums to be preserved for all time, for many indigenous peoples, one generation’sart becomes the raw materials for the next generation’s artistic activity.

10. I have changed the verb tense in this passage from past to present tense both torender a sense of being there and to enhance the overall flow of the essay.

11. It is worth saying a bit more about Bakhtin’s notions of dialogue and dialogicshere. In his various studies of novelistic discourse, Bakhtin explored how different nar-rative voices interpenetrate in certain novels, making them inherently dialogic, self-organizing, and capable of multiple and diverse meanings in different historical andcultural contexts. Extrapolating a philosophical anthropology from Bakhtin’s (1975/1981) work on novelistic discourse, we can argue that more than anything, he protestedagainst totalizing regimes that would insist on the determinateness or “finalizability”of human language and human life. Instead, Bakhtin insisted that language and life areopen and highly contingent and “unfinalizable.” Bakhtin’s notion of “unfinalizability”is probably most fully developed in Rabelais and His World (Bakhtin, 1929/1984), a bookthat deals with the medieval carnival and its role in the lives of common people. Thecarnival is a space where hierarchies are inverted and critical and destabilizing energiesare realized according to a kind of Blakean logic. In the carnival context, received formsof rationality and truth are subverted by the deliberately grotesque bodies of the peopleeating, drinking, making music, and having sex. As Stam (1989) noted, “Bakhtin’soxymoronic carnival aesthetic, in which everything is pregnant with its opposite,implies an alternative logic of nonexclusive opposites and permanent contradictionthat transgresses the monologic true-or-false thinking typical of Western Enlighten-ment rationalism” (p. 22). Dialogue and unfinalizability are “natural” processes thatsubvert culturally produced norms and hierarchies. Within Bakhtin’s dialogic logic,the “natural” unity of the world is self-organizing, contingent, and polyphonic.

12. Worth recalling here is the fact that bodies of water resulted from Earthmaker’sunintentional crying and that the formless substance of water had originally separatedmale beings from the stone and rock of female beings. Since Trickster’s arrival, how-ever, water has no longer functioned in this way.

13. I have altered Kermode’s (1967) suggestion that myth is for maintaining orderand that fiction is for finding things out. Myths are also fictions and thus cultural instru-ments for finding things out, a point that Turner (1969) also noted.

14. The idea that myths might function as material fictions was discussed byRicoeur (1976, p. 94). The idea that cultural narratives make visible possible worlds andpossible selves into which readers/hearers insert themselves was addressed exten-sively by Bruner (1986, 1990).




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George Kamberelis is an associate professor of literacy studies at the Universityat Albany, State University of New York. He teaches courses on critical socialtheories, social and cultural aspects of literacy learning, and qualitativeinquiry. His research has focused primarily on genre studies, discourse andidentity, and philosophical and theoretical foundations of qualitative inquiry.




Trickster as Premodern Avatar of Postmodern Research Practice

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