The Bushman Trickster: Protagonist, Divinity, and Agent of Creativity

Abstract

In focusing on the trickster’s ontological and moral ambiguity, we draw attention to this mythological being’s status as the “ultimate marginal man” and as the “spirit of disorder and enemy of boundaries.” As a liminal being who confounds every category and all conceptual boundaries, and who shuttles the borders between the mythological past and the here-and-now, the trickster becomes a being of all possibilities and an agent of creativity. His errand wanderings frequently take him to the world of humans, whose antic ways he reacts to with bemusement and with an irrepressible urge to stir up things. The trickster reminds us of the “infinite possibilities of the outside,” and the relativity, as well as the finiteness and specious fragility, of the order we impose on our world. The world dealt with here is that of the Bushmen, a hunter-gatherer people of southern Africa, in whose folklore and religion the trickster looms large. I will profile this figure and draw parallels to trickster figures in other parts of the world.

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