the trickster a study in american indian mythology

The following paper is the presentation of one such Trickster myth, that found among the Siouan-speaking Winnebago of central Wisconsin and eastern Nebraska. Although repeatedly combined with other myths and frequently drastically reorganized and reinterpreted, its basic plot seems always to have succeeded in reasserting itself. Many of the Trickster's traits were perpetuated in the figure of the mediaeval jester, and have survived right up to the present day in the Punch-and-Judy plays and in the clown. We encounter it among the ancient Greeks, the Chinese, the Japanese and in the Semitic world. The Trickster myth is found in clearly recognizable form among the simplest aboriginal tribes and among the complex. Few other myths have persisted with their fundamental content unchanged.

For few can we so confidently assert that they belong to the oldest expressions of mankind. To be sure, there have been reports of regional or tribal folklore scholarship, e.g., the ones appearing in the Journal of American Folklore in 1947 for the Iroquois (Fenton), the Algonquian (Flannery), the Plains Indians (Lowie), the southeastern Indians (Haas) and the Indians of the far west (Ray), but there is no overview of the folklore scholarship of the scope of Hultkrantz's fine survey of North American Indian religion scholarship (1965).Summary: Few myths have so wide a distribution as the one, known by the name of the Trickster, which we are presenting here.

However, with particular reference to folklore, there has never been a comprehensive survey of North American Indian folklore scholarship. as found among the North American Indians, Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others, and who is.

In addition to the older Handbook of American Indians North of Mexico (1907, 1910), there are such works as Clark Wissler's The American Indian (1938) and his Indians of the United States (1966), Ruth Underbill's Red Man's America : A History of Indians in the United States (1953), Harold Driver's Indians of North America (1961), and Robert Spencer and Jesse Jennings, The Native Americans : Prehistory and Ethnology of the North American Indians (1965). Jung is published Philosophical Library New. General surveys of the American Indian and his culture abound. The Trickster A Study in American Indian Mythology by Paul Radin With commentaries by Karl Kerenyi and C. George Peter Murdock's third edition (1960) of his Ethnographic Bibliography of North America contains more than 17,000 entries for 277 groups. A full definition of the trickster, a term borrowed from anthropology, lies beyond the limits of this paper indeed there is some debate as to how this mythic archetype is best defined. There have been numerous books and articles written about the American Indian.

The trickster a study in american indian mythology