Living Sideways: Tricksters in American Indian Oral Traditions

Living Sideways: Tricksters in American Indian Oral Traditions. By Franchot Ballinger. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006 [2004]. Pp. xii + 212, preface, introduction, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95 paper) For students of folklore, familiarity with Coyote and other versions of Trickster is important because of the prominence of these figures in American Indian narrative. In Living Sideways: Tricksters in American Indian Oral Traditions, Franchot Ballinger raises important questions concerning tricksters, including those centering on hindrances to outsiders' understanding of them: "What do we really know about tricksters if we view them through Euro-American and not tribal eyes? How does one negotiate the differences (in trickster stories) and what about the similarities? And: "What can a single telling of a story reveal to us about its culture?"(7) Ballinger's book is, overall, a compendium of scholars' failed attempts to explain the significance of tricksters in America Indian traditions, though the author does give credit where it is due, and he does offer some analysis of his own to help us better understand the trickster enigma. In the process we become well acquainted with the bulk of trickster scholarship produced up to the mid-1990s. In his introduction, he outlines the general contours of previous scholarship, presents a need for multi-modal interpretation of trickster stories, and explains the polyvocality and overlapping of myth and story in American Indian oral tradition: "Such an array of meanings is certainly consistent with the many-sided nature of reality as manifested in the trickster himself" (17). The book's exposition then follows-a via negativa route along which the author points up deficiencies of prior interpretation. In chapter one, Carl Jung's and Paul Radin's stress on Trickster as archetype and cultural hero (Jung 1972, Radin 1956), Mac Linscott Ricketts' view of Trickster's humanist elements (1966, 1987), Barbara Babcock-Abrahams' notion of marginality (1975), andjarold Ramsey's interpretation of Trickster as bricoleur (1977) are examined. All interpretations are useful within limits, the author observes-but most, if not all, interpreters seem to have fitted Trickster into their own paradigms without doing justice to Trickster's wider significance, especially to American Indians themselves: "Like subatomic particles, tricksters never allow a final definition of time, place, and character. They never settle or shape themselves to allow closure either fictional or moral" (30). In chapter two, the author explores why tricksters are generally associated with animals, along with Trickster's role as cultural hero. Trickster's activities as wanderer help define the experiential physical and social world-but also deconstruct the same definitions through comic inversion of the mythic journey. Here Ballinger discusses the contributions and shortcomings of such interpreters as Andrew Wiget (1990), Barry Lopez (1981), William Bright (1993), and Claude Levi-Strauss (1963). Chapter three emphasizes the role of humor in trickster narrative. Ballinger agrees with Babcock-Abrahams that "American Indian trickster figures stories dramatize the ever-present conflict and interplay between the individual and society; between freedom and constraint" (61). But he challenges all theory based upon individualism-an imported cultural element that does not resonate with Native American tradition: "The romanticism that has shaped the dominant culture's privileging individualism does not operate in the American Indian world." (65). A traditional American Indian attitude, he says, would not deny separate identity, but would see it developing only in interaction with community. Although I (and doubtless many psychologists, sociologists, historians, and philosophers) take issue with Ballinger's implication of romanticism as a main source of the Western notion of individuality, the tension between autonomy and community does provide insight into why trickster tales that ridicule antisocial behavior are important within traditional American Indian communities, and why they are funny. …