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Since the collapse of the World Trade Center Towers, it has become a
public cliche to see September 11th as a cultural watershed. After the collapse, the world
is not the same. And whether one talks of an America United, the war between
civilizations, Macworld meets Tribal World, the morphing of freedom-fighters into
terrorists or vice versa, or globalization vs. nationalism, folk wisdom has it that all is
different on this side of that event. Such demarcation is fit subject for trickster
research, and I suspect that cultural watersheds are exactly the kind of activities that
trickster research concerns itself
We know, for example, that cultural prohibitions are the exact area of
trickster play, and deceit, disguise, and destruction are surely markers of the darkside
of Trickster, the enemy of boundaries and the transgressor of cultural prohibitions. Still
Trickster is usually seen in terms of humor; as clown, buffoon, or selfdeceiver (to a
knowing audience), he is the butt of jokes. But since grins and grimaces or tears
and laughter have, as Wittgenstein might say, a "family resemblance", this
disorderly aspect of Trickster can be dark and dangerous because it stirs up what the
cultural mythos has tried to supplant, it violates the rules of cultural containment, and
it turns marginalities so the culture has to reconsider the impact of its prohibitions on
its members.
It is easy, in the fashion Attorney General Ashcroft or a host of other
security bureaucrats, to go paranoid after the events of September 11. And it is equally
easy to exo-phobically pull together against an outside threat with metaphoric or not so
metaphoric wars, but from a wider viewpoint, this tricksteresque script is as much a
narrative about Macworld globalization as it is about the President's global varmint hunt.
The World Trade Center surely represents the cultural change required by
a globalized economy, and as has always been the case of economic expansion, the
exportation/importation of economies meets cultural resistance. And the dynamic of such
cultural clashes, internal or external -- colonial or post-colonial, is fit ground for
Trickster's play. Yet here this play does not strike us as jokes where we know the limits
of pain and can laugh with collusion at the strictures implied by trickster self-imposed
difficulties, rather it plays itself out as Talibanic trauma, fundamentalist apocalypse,
reactionary protection, visionary cultural drama, value projection, or real
politick. The darkside of Trickster is frightening, and fear is a wondrous agent of
conservative thinking.
Still, it is fortuitous (as is usually the case with working with
Trickster) that this journal goes online during this time, and that the subject of the
essays for the first volume of Trickster's Way is the Darkside of Trickster. I
wish I could be so clever as to have thought of that sequence, but being short on
prophecy, I simply have to trust to Trickster to make such strange connections, and that
is exactly my hope for this journal. I have several goals in mind:
- To provide a clearing house for trickster research and a valuable resource for
trickster researchers
- To edit a journal that is peer-reviewed, establishing itself as both rigorous
and experimental, with intellectual worth and academic value.
- To use the immediacy of electronic communication to distribute scholarship
faster and further, with less lead-time to "publication".
- To build up a larger international community of scholars dealing with Trickster
and to facilitate the exchange of their ideas.
- To explore the uses, abuses, and functions of the trickster figure from as large
an interdisciplinary perspective as possible.
- To establish a forum where those interested in Trickster can share ideas,
discoveries, resources, and responses and get quick feedback on their thinking.
- To explore the complexity of Trickster and to articulate the semiotic functions
of the trickster figure.
- To help folks understand the kind of vision the trickster narratives can
produce.
- To have the fun and to share the wooliness of Trickster.
I realize that my goals, or any goals for that matter, about Trickster
are subject to trickster's whim and that generalizations about Trickster are subject to
the trickster transgression of boundaries. But that should be part of the fun and
the vision that trickster narratives bring to authors and readers alike. Mostly, I
think this electronic form, subject as it is to all sorts of errors and strangeness, is
prime Trickster territory. It challenges our normal assumptions about scholarship, the
disciplines, publication, collaboration, and other unarticulated cultural notions about
the intellectual community and its examination of culture, and I think that challenge will
be enough to satisfy, intrigue, and inspire interesting thoughts, publications, and
dialogue -- what more could one want? I invite you, as reader or scholar, to join with me
in this challenge and see where Trickster will take us -- sometimes to the darkside,
sometimes to light, but always with a verve and vitality that is hard to ignore.
Please direct comments to C. W. Spinks
Editor and Publisher (cspinks at trinity.edu) |
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