The Political Sociology and Anthropology of Evil: Tricksterology

Agnes Horvath, Arpad Szakolczai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429857652
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book offers a new approach to the problem of evil through an examination of the anthropological figure of the 'trickster'. A lesser known and much more recent term than evil, the authors use the trickster to facilitate a greater understanding of the return of evil in the modern era. Instead of simply opposing 'good' and 'evil', the figure of the trickster is used to pursue the trajectories of similarities and quasi-similarities through imitation.

After engaging with the trickster as presented in comparative anthropology and mythology, where it appears in tales and legends as a strange, erratic outsider, the authors seek to gain an inside perspective of trickster knowledge through an examination of mythology and the classical world, including both philosophers and poets. The book then goes on to trace the trickster through prehistory, using archaeological evidence to complement the diverse narratives. In this way, and by investigating the knowledge and customs surrounding evil, the authors use the figure of the trickster to provide an unprecedented diagnosis of the contemporary world, where external, mechanical rationality has become taken for granted and even considered as foundational in politics, economics, and technologised science. The authors advance the idea that the modern world, with its global free markets, mass mediatic democracy and technologised science, represents a universalisation of trickster logic. The Political Sociology and Anthropology of the Evil will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of social theory, political anthropology and political sociology, as well as those interested in the ways in which evil can infiltrate reality.

Part I

Presenting the trickster

1 The trickster in anthropology

The figure as seen from the outside

Anthropological and ethnological accounts about the beliefs of archaic people since the beginnings abound in stories about a most particular figure. This figure, on the one hand, is a marginal outcast, derided as a good-for-nothing and an ignorant fool, but on the other hand is most respected and feared, considered as a culture hero, even a second founder of the world. Such stories were particularly widespread in North America, West Africa and South-east Asia, but are present all around the planet, playing a major role even in various European mythologies and folktales, as Loki in Scandinavia, the leprechaun in Ireland or Hermes in Greece. The figure, technically called a ‘trickster’, therefore embodies paradox and ambivalence.¹

However, as if raising ambivalence to another level, such stories were often played down, ignored, or even outright hidden by the rising anthropological discipline itself. Thus, while the discussion of the trickster was present in the American anthropology in the 19th century, when Boas decided to re-found anthropology this discussion became all but lost. Even more strikingly, Paul Radin, who came to write the classic work on the trickster as an agent of transformation, was Boas’s student and defended his PhD thesis before the First World War, but did not gain a position in anthropology. We do even know the exact theme of his thesis, and he did not publish his book on the trickster until the age of 73. Similarly, in English anthropology, the figure of the trickster was propagated by John W. Layard,² who did his studies in Cambridge, but for a set of not fully clear reasons became marginalised in anthropology, never having a proper position, and his work on the trickster only reached a limited audience. The outcome of all this is that even now the figure is hardly known in the social sciences, though we argue in this book that it is most helpful to make sense of our world – particularly in capturing the ambivalence of modernity, that the price of progress is destruction. It is as if destined to open the doors to the secrets of modernity, concerning the false promises of an infinite growth brought about by technological change, for which one only has to give up mindfulness and believe blindly in progress. Apparently, it was due to this character that it became ignored, as if a hidden knowledge not to be divulged, together with similar key concepts like liminality, rites of passage and imitation, by some of the founding fathers of the social sciences, like Boas and Durkheim, and their main students, like Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski, Kroeber, Lévi-Strauss or Bourdieu.

According to Radin (1972: xxiv), the trickster is one of the oldest and most universal figures of human culture, even a kind of speculum mentis.³ The figure can perhaps be best introduced through the highly unique way in which it is situated, in-between the human, the animal, and the divine (Bright 1993: 174–176; Horvath 2008; Radin 1972); at any rate, hybrid and unreal, though effective in promoting transformation.

In most folktales, all around the world, the trickster is represented in an animal form. Such animals prominently include the snake, the spider and the fox, but also the monkey, coyote, hare, and many others. These animals are proverbially associated with a cunning and sly attitude, always ready to attack by deploying some ruse, jumping out of the dark or stealing from behind, setting up traps for the unwary; but also with a kind of lonely outsider status, being always alone, without companions, and also far from the general scenery of life where other animals are supposed to share a common living space. Thus, the specific type of knowledge characteristic of the trickster – cunning, deceit or ruse, in contrast to more direct (whether pacific or violent) means – is evident. The trickster is never straight, neither friend nor a specific foe, always hidden and crooked, and rather intent on first confusing any such distinction, questioning the very meaning of straightness itself, then projecting its own crookedness as equal in rights, eventually even as a model. Furthermore, if the trickster is directly represented in a human form, it always evokes very ancient times, often even directly called as ‘the old man’ (Bright 1993: xi, 20; Guenther 1999: 7–8; Stephenson 2000: 195; Layard 1930: 59–60). Tricksters are unsettled wonderers, appearing out of nowhere and again disappearing into nothingness, being closely associated with storytelling and hunting, in particular the invention of fishing nets, thus the kind of activities dominating human lives before settlement and the invention of agriculture. The close association with wild animals also points to distant origins. Finally, and at the same time, the trickster also has links to the other realm, the supernatural, though he is hardly ever described as a deity proper, and his associations are almost always connected not to the realm of the divine proper, rather to obscure areas of the underworld, the world of the living dead. The living dead is just an automatism, lacking a proper soul and the ordering power of the mind, like a Golem, while also serving as model for the first machine, a substitute for man's power.

While such an in-between position, extending at the same time to the human, the animal and the divine, is already quite unique, even more specific is the trickster’s ability of shifting shapes between different corresponding forms. The ability of metamorphosis, or of taking up different forms, is a characteristic of gods in many traditions – though in our reading this fact itself indicates some kind of trickster interference. Yet, for gods this is rather a minor attribute, and never questions their fundamental character. Specific to the trickster is a certain – again paradoxical, ambivalent, even absurd – essential hybridity: the trickster is not a divinity that occasionally might don an animal shape, rather it as if hovers between these different shapes, leaving normal humans at a loss in guessing whether the being they encounter is a human in a fox shape, an inferior – and easily infernal – deity masked as an old man, or a spider that can transmogrify itself into a demon at any moment. The most paradoxical hybridity of the trickster, however, is that it comes from nothing and itself is nothing, a living dead, with multiple, undefined souls.

A further, crucial feature of the trickster, if we combine the various traditions, is that while it is a kind of divinity, it is in permanent conflict with the gods, especially the main, creator deity, and even more so with the main female deity, the Great Goddess. Behind various trickster stories we not only get a glimpse of very ancient times, which in contemporary terminology we can easily associate with the Neolithic, even the Palaeolithic, but of a very ancient conflict between the gods and the kind of obscure semi-divinities or rather in-between beings that are the tricksters. The outcome of such struggles, almost always and quite inevitably, is that the trickster loses; however, a good indication that this is not the full story is contained in the fact that it is also considered, in many traditions, as – using a problematic term – the second founder of the world.

Such figures, and events, could easily be translated into the Biblical language of the original sin and the devil, or the conflict between Zeus and the Titans, in the terminology of Greek mythology. Alternatively, one could opt for the opposite solution and make use solely of the anthropological and mythological tradition outside our own culture. We decided upon an approach that perhaps is more difficult at the start, but promises to be more rewarding, and which is to argue that the trickster belongs to a single tradition, that can be traced to the Palaeolithic, using archaeological facts, and should be approached genealogically, starting from the most remote past, and not projecting backwards our own worldview, following evolutionist schemas. Thus, from this perspective, let us try to make sense of this strange being, the trickster, which came to challenge the divine given order.

To start with, in the various traditions, taken together, the trickster is described through practically any possible negative human characteristics. The trickster is a liar and a thief, a glutton and a lecher, a cheat, deceiver, outlaw, outcast, fool and clown, a street robber and brigand, an intriguer but also using insolent language, an impudent immoral braggart; cold, impotent, never to be satisfied, full of resentment. In order to make sense out of such a seemingly infinite list we can start by noting that the trickster can be characterised not simply by a series of negative features, but first of all by a number of lacks, gaps, and absences. We can start by one of the most evident and striking characteristics of the trickster, its lack of any cooperation. The trickster is not only lonely, but simply fails to belong anywhere. Solitude even in our days is a taxing condition, but in prehistoric times it was almost unthinkable and unliveable – except, evidently, for the trickster. In fact, the ultimate punishment in those days, as evidenced by the term ‘homo sacer’, was banning (see Agamben 1998) – and the trickster indeed shows many similarities to the homo sacer.

Being alone means not simply being outside the community, but having no family; in fact, being outside the lines of descent or filiation characteristic of family-based communities, thus human life. The trickster is not only impotent, its offspring being artificially produced hybrids (Horvath 2019c), but does not seem to have parents either, in most accounts. However, just as it is true for most of his other features, this can suffer a radical reversal: suddenly, strikingly, the trickster settles down and has a family, even a multiplicity of children, where – as a further reversal of the standard storyline – it can even change gender, giving birth to numerous offspring (Radin 1972: 137–140). Still further, in just as sudden and striking manner, the trickster might leave his family and return to his aimless wandering ways. In several accounts this aspect of the trickster has a further variation: while he is impotent, unable to generate normal offspring, it succeeds in bringing into the world a new breed of monsters, or hybridity (Dumézil 1986).

The trickster stories, as they survived into our present, remain at the phenomenological level: they tell us how these figures were perceived and experienced over the long centuries and millennia, but can hardly offer proper reasons and explanations about how tricksters had become what they were, and what they were set to do. They tell us how the trickster appears, always out of the blue, and often with surprising suddenness (in fact, such sudden appearance belongs to one of its central features, or key tricks), but cannot relay why the trickster is man-made, as it was conjured up by man himself – by some foolish minds, the kind which was incapable for goodness, for good dispositions. It is here that more reflexive, philosophically based accounts help move further. Such a point was advanced by Leon Battista Alberti in his Momus (see Horvath 2013: 65–74), suggesting that central for the trickster is the incapacity to trust and to give, thus ordinary sociability and filiation.

Closely connected to his lack of sociability is the absence of any authentic emotions of cooperativity. The trickster not only cannot love anybody else, but is incapable of friendship as well. In many stories the trickster figure is presented as a friend of the gods, and they even need him, due to his keen cunning intelligence (Détienne and Vernant 1978); but even the gods cannot trust him (Dumézil 1986: 10; Turville-Petre 1964: 128, 131–136). In fact, the trickster simply does not feel anything, one of the main reasons why it is able to suggest solutions to problems, with its ruse, in situations where others are overcome by their emotions.

But the trickster not only lacks a number of basic characteristics, fundamental for human and social life, but simply is absence, almost nothingness itself. This is captured in a particularly telling etymology of the name of a demon that in some accounts is identified with the Winnebago trickster: ‘he-of-whose-existence-one-is-doubtful’ (Radin 1972: 150).

However, as if to compensate for such absences, the trickster also has a series of features that indicates the opposite of absence: excess, plenty, multitude, the key for its human usage and exploit – though never fullness, contentment, satisfaction. This is most evidently related to his performance of basic bodily functions. The trickster has an excessive appetite, a yearning for forms: it eats and drinks enormous amounts and – a logical consequence – it also evacuates its body very frequently, and in enormous quantities. Still, the act most characteristic of the trickster, which for him becomes indeed nothing else but a bodily function, is sexuality. He takes up every possible sexual shape and position, using indiscriminately any possible entry to the body (Blakely 2006: 3; Radin 1924: 18–19; Radin 1972: 137–138, 165–168; Layard 1930: 524–525; Dumézil 1986: 217–218; Horvath 2008; Turville-Petre 1964: 129, 131, 144), as inventive ploys for corruption.

These features culminate in a particularly important feature: the trickster embodies excess itself, or hubris. Here again the figure of Prometheus is particularly helpful, even the Titans in general, through their hubris, or outrageous arrogance. This term plays a particularly important role in Greek thought, as hubris captures a kind of personality trait that is different both from a deed that can be punished by law, but also from the idea of evil (Gernet 2001: preliminary chapter). Yet, hubris has vital, even foundational connections to the law, and also to evil. On the one hand, acts of hubris were not punishable by law (Gernet 2001: ch. 1). On the other, the etymological origin of the word ‘evil’ is the same as that of hubris, the idea of failing to give respect to due limits (Onions 1966: 332). Thus, even if we moderns might not associate hubris with evil or the diabolical, a main reason why it is often claimed that the idea of evil is foreign to Greek thinking, they knew it better and considered hubris as the very source of evil.⁴

By now, another turn has been completed. We started from the trickster’s fundamental deficiencies; then moved to the opposite features, its excesses; and now we discovered that the source of its excesses, or its plenty, is another shortcoming: the failure to keep order and respect limits. The situation, actually, is even more perplexing, as the trickster essentially belongs to the limit, being nothing but a figure of the threshold, a boundary marker, even a mediator.⁵

Here we reach something in between a great wisdom and a mind-boggling paradox. A figure of the threshold, or the limit, just because it stands in between two realms, or modes of being, cannot belong exclusively to any of the two, thus must be literally in-between – a hybrid, demonstrating features of both. Yet, at the same time, a limit also means measure, thus has a certain model value, which cannot be taken up by an insignificant, weightless figure, being prone to any excess. How could someone destined to mark the measure become transformed into a figure of excess? This might well be the greatest mystery around this strange figure that is the trickster.

We need to investigate further, in particular concerning the specific type of knowledge attributed to the trickster, and the manner in which the in-betweenness, or ambivalence, of the figure has been thematised.

Ambivalence or ambiguity is a central feature of the trickster in every tradition (Détienne and Vernant 1978: 3–4; Guenther 1999: 4–6, 95–115). Such ambivalence includes elusiveness: when encountering a trickster, one can hardly even recognise whether this brings fortune or disaster (Radin 1972: 147–150); furthermore, one hardly knows whether one meets a trickster or not, given that the trickster is difficult to pin down, as it manages to change shape. Even further, the trickster is at home in confused and inchoate situations, thus purposefully attempts to proliferate them; can only live and thrive in situations which others find intolerable. Finally, the most important and also most lethal ambivalence of the trickster concerns its attitude with respect to knowledge – at any rate, one of its most characteristic and important features.

Very often the trickster appears, in the full ambivalent meaning of the term, as a witless idiot. Not being part of the community, of any community, he does not know how to behave, ignoring customs and all those aspects of a culture that can only be known through long-term personal belongingness. Yet, at the same time the trickster also knows many things, even things that are not known at all, or distinctly feared, by all members of the community. Thus, at the same ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Presenting the trickster
• PART II: Tracking trickster traces: evil machinations
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index