![]() Rarely do we have the tales in their original languages, or in more than a single version, together with the indigenous commentary that would make deep translation and comparison more reliable. Tricksterlike myths and stories have emerged from many of their reports, but only a few collections of trickster tales have been gathered and examined within the context of their social and religious settings. Travelers, ethnographers, and, more recently, Africans themselves have studied hundreds of African societies. Such study is only now passing into its second phase. ![]() This observation may tell more about the history of Western colonialism and ethnography than it does about the tricksters of non-Westerners, but it does suggest that anyone who wants to know the trickster in Africa must study the particular ways and speech of many different African peoples. Unlike many tricksters elsewhere, however, these multiform world-shatterers and pathfinders in Africa are woven not only into the fabric of myth but also into the stuff of everyday life, playing a part in economics, rites of passage, and ordinary conversation. Like their counterparts in Amerindian myth and folklore, African tricksters inject bawdiness, rebellion, and wild lying (one might aptly call it polymorphous perversity) into the mythic history and the common experience of divine-human relations wherever they appear. Through it they strike up absurd conversations between laundresses and goddesses, sex and death, flatulence and spiritual power, breaking the univocal by the anomalous and so opening human life -bodily, daily, defined -to its sacramental immensity. ![]() African tricksters speak and embody a vivid, subtle language of sacred transformation. ![]()
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