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Reflecting changing disciplinary orientation, recent perspectives on non-Western ritual clowns have rejected earlier functionalist interpretations and foregrounded themes of criticism, deconstruction, and subversion. In this essay, I interpret a ritual clown performance formerly practiced by the Northwestern Maidu of California both as an objectification, by way of symbolic inversion, of valorized cultural forms and as a metasociological discourse on the relationship between egoistic dispositions and normative disciplinary constraints. The interpretation suggests that functional and subversive meanings and effects are fusional rather than opposing elements in such performances and that the Maidu clown is best understood in relation to quotidien modes of deviance and to the diverse social locations represented in his audience. [clowns, inversionary ritual, Native North America, transgression, cultural criticism]
Long since soberly assimilated to functionalism as so many object-lessons on the inevitability of received convention, non-Western clowns, tricksters, and inversionary rituals acquired in the 1960s and 1970s new significance as symbolic embodiments of creative forces producing cosmic and social order. Yet more recently, ritual clowns have acquired a reputation for a kind of postmodern subversion, for cultivating critical or deconstructionist perspectives on les grands recits of their own societies.
In this essay, I take a discussion of the Northwestern Maidu ritual clown as an occasion for reflecting anew on the alignment of these varying perspectives on the meanings and effects of performed transgression. While sharing the conviction that ritual is, in V. Turner's (1976:51) idiom, "society talking about itself"-that ritual clowning is a meta-cultural discourse on received structure and convention-existing functional, symbolic, and critical perspectives differ as to the character of the talk in which the clown engages. If the "old functionalism" exhibits a predictable obliviousness to the possibility of clownish insurrection, the "new criticism" rather de-emphasizes the clown's conventional character. In this essay, I develop the idea that the Maidu clown and other ritual clowns of subversive cast exhibit the Janus-faced capacity to point both towards and away from received convention, at once legitimizing the cultural order as naturally given and destabilizing it as artificially contrived. The Maidu clown performance exhibits an especially strong affinity with themes of conservatism and subversion since it dramatizes a disenchanted and, indeed, Hobbesian perspective on the relationship between authority and conformity and between individual dispositions...