Copyright © 2009 by University of Nebraska–Lincoln, all rights reserved. Redistribution or republication in any medium, except as allowed under the Fair Use provisions of U.S. copyright law, requires express written consent from the editors and advance notification of the publisher, the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
The trickster is the embodiment of lawlessness
and paradox. He is a divine buffoon, a hero
who breaks taboos, a rebel, a coward, and a
creator. Trickster helps establish social rules,
and he deliberately flouts them. He is commonly
depicted as deceitful and humorous.
He is amoral, rather than immoral, and he has
a voracious appetite for food and sex. In his
traditional and mythic incarnations, he is almost
always male. As the supreme boundarycrosser,
trickster is always between classifications–
between what is human and what is
animal, between what is cultural and what is
natural.
Native American tricksters tend to be associated with animal spirits (such as Coyote, Rabbit, or Raven). Their tales are both sacred myths and simple folk tales. Among the Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains, the trickster's name is Old Man (Crow and Blackfoot), Iktomi (Lakota), and Veeho (Cheyenne). The most common incarnation of the Plains trickster, however, is Coyote.
In his various (and strikingly similar) cultural guises, trickster is the self-indulgent clown who dupes women into having sex with him; he steals food from his industrious neighbors; he cross-dresses and becomes temporarily a woman; he dies and is reborn. As expected, his tomfoolery frequently backfires. He juggles his eyes and loses them in a tree; he accidentally sleeps with his wife; he drowns in his own feces; he uses his enormous penis to attack a chipmunk (who in turns bites his penis off to "human" size). Further, trickster is a cultural hero. In some narratives, he creates the Earth; he creates animals or substantially alters their bodies; he steals tobacco from the gods; and, more recently, he tricks the white man.
Symbolically, the trickster is always located
at the periphery of the community (though,
importantly, never totally separated from
it). From this "outer" vantage point, trickster
reveals "inner" communal structures. His
very presence determines the limits of social
boundaries. Trickster thus serves as a political
tool with which to subvert (or endorse) social
practices. Indeed, trickster continually offers
us the possibility of transcending (or renewing)
social codes. As such, trickster is arguably
an incarnation of creativity itself. At the very
least, trickster allows us to poke fun at the
powers that restrain us. He reveals the structure
of social structures and offers us glimpses
of new (and terrifying) world orders. Not surprisingly,
many contemporary authors use
tricksterlike characters as creative forces that
both define and critique dominant cultural
practices.
Ultimately, the trickster is disturbing, not because of his difference but because of his lack of difference. As purely a cultural construct, the trickster's body is a cultural body–our body. He is always a part of us, and he exists only to be interpreted. And when we interpret trickster, we interpret ourselves. Even though we often attempt to alienate ourselves from the trickster–by making his body grotesque, indistinguishable–wherever we are, there is trickster, laughing at what we've become.