This paper argues that trustworthiness is an epistemic virtue that promotes objectivity. I show that untrustworthy imposture can be an arrogant act of privilege that silences marginalized voices. But, as epistemologists of ignorance have shown, sometimes trickery and the betrayal of epistemic norms are important resistance strategies. This raises the question: when is betrayal of trust epistemically virtuous? After establishing that trust is central to objectivity, I argue for the following answer: a betrayal is epistemically vicious when it strengthens or (...) promotes oppressive, exclusive networks of trust, and a betrayal is epistemically virtuous when it expands trust networks to involve the oppressed. These criteria correctly account for both the epistemic vice of a recent case of Internet imposture and the epistemic virtue of resistant tricksters. (shrink)

The following essay investigates the animating force of jester-humour and trickster-critique as necessary components of prophetic consciousness and social movement. Climate change devastation coupled with racialised socio-economic predation today faces social movement with a stark demand. The root-work necessary enjoins challenge of human presumption about the meaning of life at the most basic level. The locus from which such a depth-exploration will be elaborated here is postindustrial Detroit, on the part of a poet-activist-educator who will insist that ‘jesterism’ as (...) ‘prophetic animation’ cannot merely be ‘talked about’, but begs performance and embodiment – even in the process of writing and theorising. Indigenous wisdom and folk spirituality will supply historical perspective in asserting laughter as both antidote to trauma and tactic of critique – whether looking at traditional African practices of tricksterism reincarnate in everyday street life in Detroit, medieval Christian celebrations of the Feast of Fools subverting official Church orthodoxies in feudal Europe, or the postmodern insurgence of hip-hop beats and tags in challenging corporate gentrification and church capitulation at the emblematic heart of de-industrialisation. (shrink)

It seems that every culture shares a figure who tricks and transgresses rules even if at the same time he is a Cultural Hero. Based on a classification of some basic characteristics common to all tricksters, and despite the fact that contradiction and ambiguity are fundamental for their identity, this paper deals with trickster’s traces in several Medieval Literature characters as Loki, Renart, Tristan, Merlin, robin Hood, and the anonymous mischievous deceiver of short stories.

For centuries, the trickster has been used in various narratives, including mythological, literary and cinematic, to convey the idea of agency, rebellion and, often turbulent, progress. In _The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency in Contemporary Society_,_ __Helena Bassil-Morozow_ shows how the trickster can be seen as a metaphor to describe the psycho-anthropological concept of change, an impulse that challenges the existing order of things, a progressive force that is a-structural and anti-structural in its nature. The (...) book is about being able to see things from an unusual, even ‘odd’, perspective, which does not coincide with the homogenous normality of the mass, or the social system, or a political ideology, or some other kind of authority. The Trickster and the System offers an analytical paradigm which can be used to examine relationships between tricksters and systems, change and stability, in a wide range of social, political and cultural contexts. It covers a range of systems, describes different types of tricksters and discusses possible conflicts, tensions and dialogues between the two opposing sides. One of the central ideas of the book is that social systems use shame as a tool to control and manage all kinds of tricksters – individuality, agency, creativity, spontaneity, innovation and initiative, to name but a few. The author argues that any society that neglects its tricksters, ends up suffering from decay, stagnation – or even mass hysterical outbursts. The Trickster and the System: Identity and Agency in Contemporary Society provides a fresh perspective on the trickster figure in a variety of cultural contexts. It covers a range of psychological, cultural, social and political phenomena, from personal issues to the highest level of society’s functioning: self-esteem and shame, lifestyle and relationships, creativity and self-expression, media, advertising, economy, political ideology and, most importantly, human identity and authenticity. The book is essential reading for scholars in the areas of psychoanalysis, analytical psychology, myth, cultural and media studies, narrative analysis, cultural anthropology, as well as anyone interested in critical issues in contemporary culture. Helena Bassil-Morozow is a cultural philosopher, film scholar and academic writer whose many publications include _Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd _ and _The Trickster in Contemporary Film _. Helena is currently working on another Routledge project, _Jungian Film Studies: the Essential Guide _. Her principal academic affiliation is the University of Bedfordshire, Faculty of Creative Arts, Technologies & Science. (shrink)

In this paper, I articulate and defend a conception of trust that solves what I call “the trickster problem.” The problem results from the fact that many accounts of trust treat it similar to, or identical with, relying on someone’s good will. But a trickster could rely on your good will to get you to go along with his scheme, without trusting you to do so. Recent philosophical accounts of trust aim to characterize what it is for one (...) person to trust another so as to avoid this problem, but no extant account successfully does so. I argue that connecting trust to important, normatively defined relationships like friendship, romantic partnerships and parenting shows us something important about trust. The clearest cases of trust are found within the confines of normatively defined relationships like these, suggesting that there is a normative element to trust. Trusting someone involves not just believing that another person’s good will covers your interactions. Trusting involves believing that, at least in a certain domain of interaction, you are entitled to rely on that person’s good will. This account solves the trickster problem, because a trickster is not entitled to his victim’s good will. (shrink)

This book discusses the role of the trickster figure in contemporary film against the cultural imperatives and social issues of modernity and postmodernity, and argues that cinematic tricksters always reflect psychological, economic and social change in society. It covers a range of films, from Charlie Chaplin’s classics such as _Modern Times_ and _The Great Dictator_ to contemporary comedies and dramas with ‘trickster actors’ such as Jim Carrey, Sacha Baron-Cohen, Andy Kaufman and Jack Nicholson. _The Trickster in Contemporary (...) Film_ offers a fresh perspective on the trickster figure not only in cinema but in Western culture in general. Alongside original film analyses, it touches upon a number of psychosocial issues including sovereignty of the individual, tricksterish qualities of the media, and human relationships in the mercurial digital age. Further topics of discussion include: common motifs in trickster narratives the trickster and personal relationships gonzo-trickster and the art of comic insurrection. Employing a number of complementary approaches such as Jungian psychology, film semiotics, narrative structure theories, Victor Turner’s concept of liminality and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, this book is essential reading for students and scholars of film, as well as anyone with an interest in analytical psychology and wider critical issues in contemporary culture. (shrink)

The publication of George Psalmanazar's Description of Formosa (1704–1705) and the controversy surrounding the young man who claimed to be ‘a Native of Formosa, An Island subject to the Emperor of Japan,’ must place text and author among the most audacious examples of literary fraud in any language. Psalmanazar's Formosa fabrications—including claims of endemic polygamy, cannibalism, and child sacrifice—titillated and appalled his contemporaries, including Jonathan Swift, who paid mock tribute to the ‘famous Salmanaazor’ in A Modest Proposal (1729), crediting the (...) ‘Formosan’ with being the true genius behind the plan ‘for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country’. Little attention has been paid to the possibility that Psalmanazar may have been a source for other Swift satires, including the little-known An Account of the Court and Empire of Japan (1727–1728), and major texts such as Gulliver’s Travels (1726). This essay aims to bring the image of one of the 18th century's more entertaining personalities into sharper resolution, and to explore the possibility that his influence on Swift was greater than has been generally suspected. (shrink)

_Wild/lives_ draws on myth, popular culture and analytical psychology to trace the machinations of 'trickster' in contemporary film and television. This archetypal energy traditionally gravitates toward liminal spaces – physical locations and shifting states of mind. By focusing on productions set in remote or isolated spaces, Terrie Waddell explores how key trickster-infused sites of transition reflect the psychological fragility of their willing and unwilling occupants. In differing ways, the selected texts – _Deadwood, Grizzly Man, Lost, Solaris, The Biggest (...) Loser, Amores Perros and Repulsion_ – all play with inner and outer marginality. As this study demonstrates, the dramatic potential of transition is not always geared toward resolution. Prolonging the anxiety of change is an increasingly popular option. Trickster moves within this wildness and instability to agitate a form of dialogue between conscious and unconscious processes. Waddell's imaginative interpretation of screen material and her original positioning of trickster will inspire students of media, cinema, gender and Jungian studies, as well as academics with an interest in the application of Post-Jungian ideas to screen culture. (shrink)

_The Female Trickster_ presents a Post-Jungian postmodern perspective regarding the role of women in contemporary Western society by investigating the re-emergence of female trickster energy in all aspects of popular culture. Ricki Tannen explores the psychological aspects of what happened when women’s imagination was legally and psychologically enclosed millennia ago and demonstrates how the re-emergence of Trickster energy through the female imagination has the radical potential to effect a transformation of western consciousness. Examples are drawn from a diverse (...) range of sources, from Jane Austen, and female sleuth narratives, to Madonna and Sex and the City, illustrating how Trickster energy is used not to maintain power and control but to integrate and unite the paradoxical through humour. Subjects covered include: imagination and metaphor the traditional trickster law and the imagination humour: Eros using logos the postmodern female trickster. This highly original perspective on women's role in contemporary culture will offer readers a new vision of how humour psychologically operates as a healthy adaptation to trauma and adversity. It will be of great interest to all analytical psychologists and psychoanalysts as well as those in women's, cultural, legal and literary studies. (shrink)

This essay explores cultural and psychological dynamics in indigenous Amazonian narratives about a powerful trickster figure named Made-from-Bone. Particular attention is given to the ways in which speaking verbs, quoted speeches, and dialogical interactions are used as psychological tools for understanding and explaining others'inner thoughts and emotions. Comparative analysis of two narratives set in the distant mythical past demonstrates how intentionality is a semiotic ideology that emerges through dialogical interaction. These narrative practices are deeply rooted in shamanic healing practices, (...) especially the use of musical and other symbolic sound elements as a privileged sense modality for expressing and experiencing psychological processes of making dreams, emotions, and inner thoughts into objects of conscious thought and discourse. (shrink)

This article reads Cherokee academic/author Thomas King’s “The One About Coyote Going West” and Okanagan writer Jeannette Armstrong’s “This is a Story” to question whether these Aboriginal creation tales subvert the referential race codes and the kinds of hierarchical exclusion that take place in Caucasian discourses about Homo sapiens. To do so, it draws links between Slavoj Zizek’s post identity theories, and post-colonial and Indigenous literary and nationalist epistemologies, to challenge the implications of how the Coyote narratives transformation the hegemony, (...) or “the big Other.”. (shrink)

It is widely asserted that we are now living in a post-truth society. What that means, this book argues, is that the contemporary global world is thoroughly infested not only with trickster figures but an entire and operational trickster logic; or, that we now live in a Trickster Land - an argument advanced by the claim that in modernity liminality has become permanent; or that modern life is patently absurd. The first part of the book presents a (...) series of 'guides' to this condition, in the form of key thinkers and writers who can help us understand and navigate our Trickster Land. Such guides include Hermann Broch, Lewis Hyde, Roberto Calasso, Michel Serres, Sándor Márai, Colin Thubron, and Albert Camus. The second part goes on to discuss five main regions of Trickster Land: art, thought, the economy, politics, and society. This last, central chapter of the book contrasts trickster logic with the basic, foundational logic of social life, presented as gift-giving by Marcel Mauss and as sociability by Georg Simmel, and which is expressed here, combining Heraclitus and Plato with the Gospel of John, by three basic terms of ancient Greek culture, as arkhé charis logos: meaningful social life originally and in its essence is animated by the power of kind benevolence. This volume will appeal to scholars of social theory, anthropology and sociology with interests in political thought and contemporary culture. (shrink)

Carl Jung coined the term "synchronicity" to describe meaningful coincidences that conventional notions of time and causality cannot explain. Working with the great quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung sought to reveal these coincidences as phenomena that involve mind and matter, science and spirit, thus providing rational explanations for parapsychological events like telepathy, precognition, and intuition. Synchronicity examines the work of Jung and Pauli, as well as noted scientists Werner Heisenberg and David Bohm; identifies the phenomena in ancient and modern mythologies, (...) particularly the Greek legend of Hermes the Trickster; and illustrates it with engaging anecdotes from everyday life and literature. (shrink)

Tamar in Genesis 38.6–30 has conventionally been interpreted as either a righteous woman who restored the discontinuity of the line of Judah or a wicked woman who employed wit and cunningness to achieve her desired ends. This paper tries to reinterpret Tamar’s act by taking account of imagination, and the women’s perspective and experiences.

Grau reconsiders the relationship between "logos" and "mythos" as a precondition to opening theological hermeneutics to discourse from other cultures and genres, other modes of telling and retelling.

This essay is a first attempt at thinking through the ways in which Native American Coyote stories can illuminate options for lesbian and feminist politics. I follow the metaphors of trickery and shape-shifting common to the stories and recommend the laughter they evoke as we engage in feminist politics and philosophy.

In order to come to your senses, Alan Watts often said, you sometimes need to go out of your mind. Perhaps more than any other teacher in the West, this celebrated author, former Anglican priest, and self-described spiritual entertainer was responsible for igniting the passion of countless wisdom seekers to the spiritual and philosophical delights of India, China, and Japan. With Out of Your Mind, you are invited to immerse yourself in six of this legendary thinker's most engaging teachings on (...) how to break through the limits of the rational mind and expand your awareness and appreciation for the great game unfolding all around us. Distilled from Alan Watts’s pinnacle lectures, Out of Your Mind brings you an inspiring new resource that captures the true scope of this brilliant teacher in action. For those both new and familiar with Watts, this book invites us to delve into his favorite pathways out of the trap of conventional awareness, including: • The art of the “controlled accident”—what happens when you stop taking your life so seriously and start enjoying it with complete sincerity • How we come to believe “the myth of myself”—that we are skin-encapsulated egos separate from the world around us—and how to transcend that illusion • Why we must fully embrace chaos and the void to find our deepest purpose • Unconventional and refreshing insights into the deeper principles of Buddhism, Hinduism, Western philosophy, Christianity, and much more. (shrink)

The article discusses Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony with a focus on textual manifestations of the figure of the trickster. The theme of shape-shifting and transformation that one usually associates with tricksters is linked here with the theme of (non)dualist timespace, the notion of interbeing, which in turn introduces the theme of trauma healing. The author combines two perspectives—Paula Gunn Allen’s view on timespace in her The Sacred Hoop, and Gerald Vizenor’s writings concerning trickster aesthetics—in order to show that (...) the narrative structure of the novel can also be seen as an embodiment of the trickster: trickster-timespace, trickster-relation, and trickster-processuality; these three manifestations of the trickster are analyzed from the perspective of one more actualization of the trickster, that of a psychopomp, the “Guide of Souls” (which is manifested both at the level of plot and narration). (shrink)