This paper explores the continuities and discontinuities in the different forms occupied by the "trickster" principle among rural Mapuche people in southern Chile. I argue that the mythical trickster, Fox, contemporary ritual clowns, and stereotypical "whitemen", all occupy a place of simultaneous creation, destruction, and inversion in Mapuche thought.
Paper long abstract
In this paper I attempt to trace the continuities between mythical accounts of Fox, the paradigmatic Mapuche trickster, ethnographic accounts of contemporary ritual clowns (koyong), and stereotypical narratives of white people. I explore how each of these figures manifests a particular "trickster" principle of simultaneous inversion, creation, and destruction. I use this continuity as the basis for engaging with one of Radin's overlooked insights - that tricksters are as much a commentary on their audience as they are upon themselves, and I thus suggest that they embody a very particular instance of what Roy Wagner termed "reverse anthropology'.