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Beetlejuice and The Sacred Clown Part 1: The Koshare and The Ritual of Breaking Every Rule · The Occult Rejects

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen. What? What's going to happen?
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Something wonderful. What? I understand how you feel. You see,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: it's all very clear to me now. Welcome to the
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: Occult Rejects. Today we are heading into one of those
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: subjects that began with a single image... and somehow opened
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: into an entire world of religion, ritual, anthropology, colonial history,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: social criticism, agriculture, obscenity, sacred performance, and one of the
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: strangest questions I've run across in my mind in a while.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Because the whole thing started with something almost stupidly simple.
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Why the fuck does this Native American ceremonial figure look
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: so much like Beetlejuice? Everybody knows the image. Michael Keaton
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: shows up, corpse white, black around the eyes... hair exploding
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: in every direction, grinning like something that is somehow funny
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: and threatening at exactly the same time, and wearing the
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: enormous black and white striped suit that has become almost
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: inseparable from the character himself. Beetlejuice is vulgar, sexually inappropriate, gluttonous, manipulative, ridiculous, dangerous,
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: and apparently incapable of entering any situation without immediately violating
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: whatever social rules everybody else has agreed to follow. He
• 1:27
  Speaker 1: is dead but active, Grotesque but charismatic, comic but threatening,
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: constantly crossing categories that are normally supposed to remain separated,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: and his entire identity is built around the sense that
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: ordinary rules simply do not apply to him. Then you
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: encounter photographs, paintings, historical descriptions, and artistic representations of ceremonial
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: clowns from Pueblo communities of the American Southwest. Particularly the
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: striking black and white striped figures associated with traditions commonly
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: called Cachere, among Kiddus-speaking Pueblo peoples and Xhosa in certain
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: Tewu contexts. And the visual resemblance can stop you cold.
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: The body can be covered in alternating black and white bands,
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: the face dramatically painted, the hair transformed into an unusual
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: ceremonial arrangement, while the behavior associated with these figures can
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: include mockery, gluttony, obscenity, exaggerated appetite, ridicule, disruption, parody, and
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  Speaker 1: deliberate violations of ordinary standards of respectable conduct. At first glance,
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: it can look like somebody dropped Beetlejuice into a Pueblo
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: religious ceremony several centuries early. The obvious question is whether
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: there is actually a connection, and as far as the
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: historical evidence currently shows, there is no definite proof to
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: claim that Tim Burton or the creators of Beetlejuice consciously
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: borrowed the character from Pueblo's ceremonial clown traditions. We are
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: not going to build one of those internet theories where
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: visual similarity somehow becomes proof of hidden cultural transmission, because
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: the resemblance is interesting precisely because we do not need
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: to exaggerate it. Once we move past the stripes and
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: begin examining what these ceremonial clowns actually do, the comparison
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: shifts from appearance into something far more complicated. Figures who
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: can mock authority, embody uncontrolled appetite, ridicule social behavior, perform
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: obscenity inside sacred contexts, exaggerate greed and foolishness, turn community
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: gossip into public satire, and sometimes behave as though every
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: rule of dignity has temporarily been suspended. Then, in some
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: documented ceremonial settings, those same clowns can stop the horseplay
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: and become responsible for helping maintain ceremonial order, controlling spectators,
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  Speaker 1: protecting the dancing space, assisting dancers, and making sure the
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: very boundaries they appear to violate are remain intact. The
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: person who breaks the rules can become the person guarding
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: the boundary, and that is where this stops being a
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: funny Beetlejuice comparison and becomes something much bigger. Because if
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: a religious community deliberately gives someone permission to behave badly,
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: the real question is not simply what the clown is doing.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: The real question is why the community needs him to
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  Speaker 1: do it. The first thing we need to clear up
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: is terminologies. because almost every lazy description of indigenous religion
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: eventually reaches the word shaman, and in this case, the
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: word creates more confusion than clarity. The Kosher are not
• 4:24
  Speaker 1: best understood as generic Native American shamans, and the word
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: Kosher itself does not refer to one universal, mythological character
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: wandering around the Southwest in a striped costume. We are
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: dealing with ceremonial roles in organized religious societies embedded within
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  Speaker 1: particular Pueblo communities. Those communities are not interchangeable. There is
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: no single people called the Pueblo tribe. Pueblo peoples include
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: numerous distinct communities with different languages, histories, political institutions, ceremonial organizations,
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  Speaker 1: religious traditions, and relationships among those institutions. Keresen-speaking communities such
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: as Cochiti have traditions commonly rendered in English as Kosher,
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: while Tewa-speaking communities have related figures often called Xhosa or
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: represented through other spellings. And still, other Pueblo peoples maintain
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: clown traditions that differ in appearance, organization, mythology, ceremonial responsibility,
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  Speaker 1: and public function. Zuni Koyemchi, Hopi Clown Societies, Jemez Clown Figures,
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  Speaker 1: and Lakota Heyoka all belong to different cultural and religious systems,
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  Speaker 1: and they should not be thrown into one giant category
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  Speaker 1: simply because outsiders notice that some of them may involve inversion, mockery,
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: grotesque performance, or contrary behavior. That distinction becomes especially important
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: when we start talking about religious function, because some historically
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: documented clown societies have been connected with curing or medicine practices,
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: while others are much more strongly associated with ceremonial policing,
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: social regulation, agricultural cycles, katsina traditions, public ridicule, seasonal organizations,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: or combinations of those responsibilities. Even when similar functions appear
• 6:13
  Speaker 1: across several communities, the meaning, structure, authority, and ritual context
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  Speaker 1: can differ substantially. Calling all these figures shamans therefore creates
• 6:23
  Speaker 1: the illusion that we have already explained their job when
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: the reality is almost exactly the opposite, because their roles
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: often cut across categories that Western religious vocabulary tries to
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  Speaker 1: keep separate. A clown can be a religious participant, a
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  Speaker 1: social critic, a disciplinarian, a performer, a ritual official, a
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  Speaker 1: ceremonial assistant, a representative of sacred or supernatural identities, and,
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  Speaker 1: in certain contexts, a healer or member of an organization
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  Speaker 1: connected with medicine. The English word clown creates its own
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  Speaker 1: problem because we immediately imagine entertainment, and entertainment is certainly
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  Speaker 1: part of what these figures can produce, but laughter alone
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  Speaker 1: does not explain them. A Western circus clown generally exists
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  Speaker 1: to entertain an audience. A Pueblo ceremonial clown may make
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  Speaker 1: people laugh while simultaneously commenting on community behavior, embodying violations
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  Speaker 1: of social norms, participating in a larger ceremonial system concerned
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  Speaker 1: with rain, agriculture, seasonal continuity, communal order, and sacred beings.
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: The laughter may be enjoyable, but it can also be corrective.
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  Speaker 1: The joke can contain a warning and And the ridiculous
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: performance may point towards something everybody already knows but nobody
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: wants to say directly. Once we understand that, the black
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: and white stripes begin to mean something very different from
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: what they meant when we first looked at them and
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: thought of Beetlejuice. Historical descriptions of Pueblo striped clown traditions
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: are striking because the transformation is not always accomplished through
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: a conventional mask. In many accounts, the performer's own body
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: becomes the surface upon which ceremony identity is constructed. Alternating
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: bands of black and white can cover the torso, arms, legs,
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  Speaker 1: and face, while the hair may be divided, raised, tied,
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: or ornamented with materials such as corn husks in ways
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  Speaker 1: that radically alter the ordinary individual. Different communities maintain different forms.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: and we need to resist pretending there is one universal
• 8:20
  Speaker 1: costume or one single theological explanation behind every variation. But
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: the larger visual principle is difficult to miss. The everyday
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: body is transformed until it no longer reads as an
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: ordinary person standing in ordinary social space. That transformation matters
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: because ritual dress and body modification are never merely decorative
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: when they change how a person is socially recognized. The
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: individual who entered the preparation space is still physically present,
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: but paint alters the skin, the hair is reorganized, ordinary
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: clothing disappears or becomes secondary, and what appears in the
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: ceremonial setting is no longer simply an everyday person behaving strangely.
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: The body itself has been reorganized into a religious sign.
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  Speaker 1: This is also where we need to resist one of
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: the worst habits in modern occult interpretation. which is seeing
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  Speaker 1: an unfamiliar symbol and immediately deciding that we already know
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  Speaker 1: what it means. Black and white can tempt people into
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  Speaker 1: automatic explanations involving life and death, light and darkness, duality,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: skeleton imagery, solar and lunar forces, or some supposedly universal
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  Speaker 1: occult binary. But unless reliable Pueblo testimony or strong community-specific
• 9:35
  Speaker 1: ethnographic evidence supports one of those interpretations, we should not
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  Speaker 1: manufacture it for them. The stripes are real, their ceremonial
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  Speaker 1: use is real, and their meaning belongs first to the
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  Speaker 1: religious traditions in which they occur, including dimensions that may
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  Speaker 1: never have been publicly explained to outsiders. That distinction matters
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: far beyond the stripes, because one of the recurring problems
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: in the history of Pueblo religion is is that outsiders
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: repeatedly mistook the ability to witness a ceremony for the
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: authority to explain it. And as we are going to
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: see later, some of those explanations became catastrophically wrong. One
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: of the most important pieces of evidence for understanding how
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: deeply the Kosher belong inside ceremonial life comes from a
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  Speaker 1: collection of Cochiti narratives published in the early 20th century
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  Speaker 1: by anthropologist Ruth Benedict. The source has to be handled carefully,
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: because these are indigenous narratives recorded and published through an
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  Speaker 1: outside anthropological project during a period when researchers often treated
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  Speaker 1: Native ceremonial knowledge as material that could simply be collected, classified,
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  Speaker 1: and distributed. We should not pretend that a Bureau of
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  Speaker 1: American Ethnology publication constitutes a complete unrestricted, or timeless statement
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  Speaker 1: of Cochiti religious doctrine. But the narratives still preserve an
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  Speaker 1: important historical record of the place the Cocher occupied within
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  Speaker 1: stories about ceremonial organization, sacred beings, migration, and communal life.
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  Speaker 1: In one narrative generally known as the Recovery of the Cocher,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: the absence of the clowns become a religious problem in itself.
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  Speaker 1: Ceremonial activity continues, dances occur, and people gather, yet the
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  Speaker 1: situation remains incomplete because the co-share are missing and the
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  Speaker 1: people are not fully happy. Eventually, the narrative moves toward
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  Speaker 1: their recovery, and Benedict preserves a line whose simplicity makes
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  Speaker 1: the implication even more powerful. The dance is not right
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: without the co-share. If the clown were merely an entertainer,
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  Speaker 1: his absence might make the event less amusing, but it
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  Speaker 1: should not make the dance itself not right. If he
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  Speaker 1: were merely a tolerated nuisance, removing him ought to make
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  Speaker 1: the ceremony smoother, and if sacred order were defined entirely
• 11:49
  Speaker 1: by restraint, dignity, and disciplined behavior, then removing the figure
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  Speaker 1: who mocks, exaggerates, overeats, ridicules, disrupts, and behaves indecently ought
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  Speaker 1: to produce a more perfect ritual. Instead, the narrative gives
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: us the opposite problem, because ceremonial completeness requires the return
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: of the person who appears, from the outside, to be
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  Speaker 1: the least ceremonial person there. That paradox gives us the
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: first real glimpse of what sacred clowning may be doing.
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: The clown is not necessarily disorder invading sacred order from
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: the outside. In this Cochiti narrative, his presence suggests something stranger,
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  Speaker 1: a form of sanctioned disorder that sacred order deliberately contains
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  Speaker 1: within itself because the ceremony would be incomplete without it.
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: That idea is going to follow us through everything else
• 12:38
  Speaker 1: in this episode. The importance of the co-share becomes even
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: harder to dismiss when we move from the story in
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: which the clowns themselves are missing to another Cochiti narrative
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: preserved in Ruth Benedict's collection in which something even more
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: serious has disappeared. The Katsinas. And the two stories almost
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: mirror one another. In the first, the co-share vanished from
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: the ceremonial world and the people discover that the dance
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: is somehow incomplete without them. In the second, sacred beings disappear.
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: The ceremonial world is again thrown out of balance, and
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: this time it is the Kosher who are called upon
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  Speaker 1: to help bring what has been lost back into relationship
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  Speaker 1: with the community. Read together, the story suggests something much
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: deeper than a simple association between clowns and entertainment, because
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: the Kosher appear precisely where absence has become a ceremonial
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  Speaker 1: problem and restoration has become necessary. The second story is
• 13:33
  Speaker 1: usually identified as the imprisonment of the Katsinas. using the
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: spelling common in the ethnographic literature of Benedict's period. And
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: it begins in a way that almost sounds like clown
• 13:43
  Speaker 1: logic before the clowns themselves even enter the action. During
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: a basket dance, the squirrel runs among the katsinas and
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: frightens them so badly that they flee and cannot be found.
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: So an apparently minor and almost ridiculous event produces an
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: enormous ceremonial crisis. Something that should be present within the
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: religious life of the community has disappeared. and the people
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: appeal to the Haluta for help. Haluta orders the Kosher
• 14:10
  Speaker 1: to search for the missing Katsinas, with Masawa repeating the
• 14:13
  Speaker 1: command as his deputy, but the clowns did not simply
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: wander off looking for them. Instead, they perform an action
• 14:20
  Speaker 1: that places them directly inside a mythic landscape of earth, vegetation, emergence,
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: and restoration. They break open the earth beneath them, and
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: from that opening, a spruce tree rises upward until it
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: reaches the place where the imprisoned Katsinas can use it
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: to return. That image is worth sitting with because it
• 14:40
  Speaker 1: is very far from what the word clown prepares us
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: to expect. The figure we have been describing as vulgar, mocking, gluttonous, ridiculous,
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: incapable of embarrassing people in public is suddenly standing at
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: an opening in the earth while a living tree becomes
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: a pathway by which missing sacred beings return to the
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: human world. The cat scene is climbed down or along
• 15:01
  Speaker 1: that living structure, weakened by their confinement, until they are
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: restored to the community, and the interruption in ceremonial life
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: is repaired. Whatever else the Kosher may be doing in
• 15:12
  Speaker 1: public performance, Benedict's narrative does not place them at the
• 15:15
  Speaker 1: margins of sacred action here. It places them directly inside
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: the process by which sacred presence is recovered. For anyone
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: coming from an occult background, the imagery almost begs to
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: be translated into systems we already know. An opening in
• 15:30
  Speaker 1: the earth, a tree joining levels of reality, beings moving
• 15:34
  Speaker 1: between realms, vegetation functioning as vertical passage, disappearance followed by return.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: If we were talking about Norse cosmology, Kabbalah, European ceremonial magic,
• 15:45
  Speaker 1: or comparative mythology, somebody would have connected the spruce to
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: the world tree, the axis mundi, the tree of life,
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: the shamanic ladder, and probably three other diagrams before lunch.
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: Some comparisons may eventually be intellectually useful, but this is
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: exactly where we need to resist taking somebody else's sacred
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: narrative and immediately converting it into our own symbolic language.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: The first obligation is to understand what the story demonstrates
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: within the cochete material itself. And what it demonstrates is
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: already strange enough. The cochere can function as agents of
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: restoration when sacred presence has been disrupted or removed. Placed
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: beside the recovery of the cochere, the pattern becomes almost symmetrical.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: In one story, the community possesses the ceremonial dances but
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: lacks the clowns, and the dance is not right until
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: the kosher return. In the other, the community loses the
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: katsinas and the kosher become instrumental in bringing them back.
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: One story asks what happens when the clowns disappear, while
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: the other asks what happens when sacred beings disappear, and
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: in both cases, ceremonial completeness depends upon restoring a missing relationship.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Benedict herself noticed the parallel and group the narratives together
• 17:00
  Speaker 1: in her notes as related stories of loss and recovery,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: which makes it difficult to dismiss the resemblance as something
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: we are imposing on the material from the outside. This
• 17:10
  Speaker 1: becomes even more important when we remember what the co-share
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: looked like, because outward ridiculousness makes it easier for an
• 17:17
  Speaker 1: outsider to assume that the clown occupies the lowest level
• 17:20
  Speaker 1: of ceremonial seriousness. The solemn dancer looks sacred, the striped
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: figure behaving like a glutton looks profane. The transformed ceremonial
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: being seems to belong to mythology while the clown appears
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: to belong to comedy, yet these narratives refuse to maintain
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: that distinction. The supposedly ridiculous figure can interact with sacred beings,
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: participate in stories of emergence and restoration, and occupy a
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: necessary position inside the ceremonial world, which means appearance does
• 17:50
  Speaker 1: not tell us rank, seriousness does not automatically tell us sacredness,
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: And dignity is not only visual language through which religious
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: authority can operate. That is one of the places where
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: religious expectations become part of the problem. We are accustomed
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: to recognize authority through solemnity. Priests wear formal clothing. Judges
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: wear robes. Military officers display insignia. Monks cultivate discipline. And
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: ceremonial specialists usually signal importance by becoming more controlled, not
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: more ridiculous. The sacred clown preserves that expectation without necessarily
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: rejecting authority at all. He may appear foolish while occupying
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: an office that is not foolish, and his obscenity or
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: lack of dignity does not automatically place him outside religion
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: any more than the terrifying appearance of a wrathful deity
• 18:37
  Speaker 1: places that deity outside religion. The contradiction is not something
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: we need to explain away. It is part of the
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: structure we are trying to understand. The spruce tree intensifies
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: that structure because vegetation is not a random prop within
• 18:51
  Speaker 1: the larger ceremonial environment surrounding these co-cheating narratives. Corn, cultivated plants, moisture,
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: seasonal growth, emergence from the earth, and the continuity of
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: food production belong to an agricultural world in which survival
• 19:05
  Speaker 1: depends upon relationships between human communities and forces that modern
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: industrial society has become very good at pretending we no
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: longer depend on. A failed harvest in a pre-industrial agricultural
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: community is not an inconvenience. and an insufficient rain is
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: not merely bad weather. Both can become questions of hunger, continuity,
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: and whether the next season can be reached at all.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: Reducing those relationships to decorative fertility symbolism therefore strips away
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: the material reality that gives agricultural religion much of its force.
• 19:38
  Speaker 1: That is why the next part of this investigation has
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: to move directly into corn, rain, and the agricultural universe.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: If we isolate the clowns from the ecological world surrounding
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: Pueblo ceremonial life, their behavior can begin to look arbitrary.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: Somebody overeats and we call it comedy. Corn husks appear
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: on ceremonial bodies and we call them decoration. Clowns appear
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: around seasonal dances and we imagine somebody decided the serious
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: religious program needed an intermission. Once agriculture enters the picture, however,
• 20:10
  Speaker 1: Food is no longer merely food, appetite is no longer
• 20:13
  Speaker 1: merely appetite, rain is no longer simply weather, and corn
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: is no longer simply a plant, because all of them
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: exist inside systems of production, restraint, distribution, renewal, and communal survival.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: There is one final detail in the two Cochiti stories
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: worth carrying with us before we move there, because restoration
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: produces not only ceremonial completeness, but happiness. When the cochera absent,
• 20:39
  Speaker 1: the dance is wrong and the people are not fully happy.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: When the missing figures return, happiness returns with them. And
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: when the cat-sceners are recovered, the community again moves from
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: loss toward restoration. That matters because Western religious history has
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: often trained us to associate authenticity with solemnity, as though
• 20:57
  Speaker 1: the quieter the sanctuary and the more restrained the worshiper,
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: the more sacred the experience must be. These narratives complicate
• 21:05
  Speaker 1: that assumption by placing laughter, communal well-being, ridiculousness, sacred presence,
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: and ceremonial necessity inside the same world. The kosher therefore
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: keep appearing exactly where our categories begin to fail. If
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: they are simply chaotic, helping restore ceremonial order would make
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: little sense. If they are simply profane, participating in the
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: recovery of sacred beings make little sense. And if they
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: are simply entertainers, the dance should remain religiously complete without them. Instead,
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: the stories place them at the boundary between absence and return,
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: disorder and restoration, laughter and seriousness, earth and emergence, community
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: and sacred presence, and once we bring corn, rain, food,
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: and seasonal survival into that picture, the boundary becomes even
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: harder to draw. If we are going to understand why
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: ceremonial clowns appear where they do, why corn husks show
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: up around their bodies, why food and exaggerated appetite reoccur
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: in clown behavior, and why these societies are repeatedly encountered
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: in connection with katsina ceremonies, rain dances, seasonal observances, and
• 22:14
  Speaker 1: agricultural ritual, then we have to stop imagining Pueblo religion
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: as though it developed inside a ceremonial vacuum separated from
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: the physical environment surrounding it. Pueblo communities lived within the
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: landscapes where rainfall could determine whether a season ended in
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: abundance or hunger, where planting schedules mattered, Irrigation mattered, seed
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: preservation mattered, and corn was not an abstract religious symbol
• 22:39
  Speaker 1: chosen because somebody thought it looked sacred. Corn fed people,
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: organized labor, structured seasonal activity, entered ceremonial practice, appeared within
• 22:49
  Speaker 1: origin and migration traditions, and became inseparable from ideas of continuity, obligation, sustenance,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: and survival. The agricultural world and the religious world were
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: not two independent systems occasionally borrowing imagery from one another.
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: They existed inside the same cycle. The point becomes easy
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: to flatten when modern people hear that a ceremony concerns
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: rain and immediately translates rain into a metaphor for purification, fertility,
• 23:17
  Speaker 1: emotional renewal, or divine blessing. For a community dependent upon
• 23:21
  Speaker 1: agriculture in an arid or semi-arid environment, rain is not
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: merely symbolic. Water becomes moisture in the soil. Moisture makes
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: germination possible, Germination becomes plants, plants become food, and food
• 23:35
  Speaker 1: sustains the people who will perform the next cycle of ceremonies.
• 23:39
  Speaker 1: When ritual systems address clouds, planting, corn, harvest, seasonal renewal,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: and the timing of rainfall, they are not abandoning material
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: reality for spirituality. They are confronting material reality at its
• 23:52
  Speaker 1: most fundamental level. Historical ethnography of the Southwest reflects this repeatedly.
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: Although the evidence has to remain community-specific, rather than being
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: turned into one universal Pueblo calendar. Ralph Beal's 1935 Comparative Survey,
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: for example, describes Pueblo ceremonial cycles involving rainmaking societies, planting,
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: the opening of irrigation systems, rain dances connected with wheat
• 24:19
  Speaker 1: and corn planting, pilgrimages for rain, summer retreats, harvest dances,
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: and other seasonal observances distributed across the agricultural year. The
• 24:29
  Speaker 1: same report places clown organizations inside that broader ceremonial world,
• 24:33
  Speaker 1: including clown chiefs among recognized religious leaders and clown societies
• 24:38
  Speaker 1: appearing alongside katsina and seasonal ceremonial systems. The details differ
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: from Pueblo to Pueblo, but the larger environment is clear.
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: These figures do not appear outside an agricultural cosmos. Their
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: ceremonial world was structured by recurring relationships among weather and
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: food production, sacred beings, human responsibility, and time. Once that
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: context is restored, material we have already encountered begins to
• 25:05
  Speaker 1: look different. In the Cochiti narratives, recorded by Ruth Benedict,
• 25:10
  Speaker 1: corn is that scenery in the background of migration and
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: ceremonial life. The people emerge carrying ears of corn, and
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: the figure Benedict rendered as Araku or Eraku is identified
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: with the corn mother. When the co-share are missing and
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: the ceremonial world is incomplete, It is the corn mother
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: who directs the people to a cochiti, where the clowns
• 25:29
  Speaker 1: will be recovered. Elsewhere in the collection, a woman's corn
• 25:33
  Speaker 1: grinding society performs ceremonial grinding so that the corn flour
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: will continue to be plentiful, while the story of corn
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: soup woman turns on the treatment of ears of corn
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: first considered undesirable before their inclusion becomes connected with abundance.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: And preservation of corn is saturated with religious meaning because
• 25:50
  Speaker 1: they are saturated with life itself. That is also why
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: Cornhusk elements and historical descriptions and artistic representations of Pueblo
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: Clowns deserve more than a quick visual mention. Smithsonian collections
• 26:03
  Speaker 1: include 20th century Hopi Pueblo Cocher or Haino Clown Katsina
• 26:07
  Speaker 1: figures made from materials including cottonwood, paint, leather, beads, and Cornhusk,
• 26:14
  Speaker 1: preserving the visible presence of agricultural material within the representation
• 26:18
  Speaker 1: of the Clown. That does not give us permission to
• 26:21
  Speaker 1: invent a universal doctrine in which every strip of corn
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: husk carries one fixed hidden meaning, but it does remind
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: us that the material culture of these figures is connected
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: to the plants, labor, and seasonal cycles upon which Playbo
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: communities depended. The relationship becomes even clearer when we stop
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: speaking broadly and look at a specific historical community. Leslie
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: White's Bureau of American Ethnology Study of Xia, Modern Xia,
• 26:49
  Speaker 1: describes Koshi-Iri and Quarina as complementary ceremonial societies, records that
• 26:54
  Speaker 1: either could accompany Katsina dancers and state that one of
• 26:58
  Speaker 1: the two was expected to be present. The same source
• 27:01
  Speaker 1: says either society could have responsibility for the corn dance
• 27:05
  Speaker 1: held on the patron saint day in August, while Kosha
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: Eri specifically performed clowning and buffoonery during intervals, saying funny things,
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: engaging in grotesque antics, sometimes speaking backward or saying the
• 27:19
  Speaker 1: opposite of what they meant, and making obscene remarks. Yet
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: the same organization also possessed disciplinary authority and could compel
• 27:27
  Speaker 1: participation in dances or punish failures of ceremonial duty. The
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: single-seer example destroys the easiest interpretation of the clown. If
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: all we knew was that the Koscieli told obscene jokes
• 27:39
  Speaker 1: during a corn dance, we might imagine a seasonal festival
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: with comic entertainment between serious performances. If all we knew
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: was that the same organization could discipline participants... regulate obligations,
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: and occupy recognized positions within ceremonial life, we might imagine
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: something closer to a governing or religious body, but put
• 27:58
  Speaker 1: the two together and the categories collapse. Quorn ceremonialism, katsina dancing,
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: contrary speech, obscenity, discipline, and institutional authority coexist within the
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: same organization, which means the ridiculousness does not cancel the
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: authority and the authority does not cancel the ridiculousness. The
• 28:19
  Speaker 1: complementary relationship among clown organizations make that institutional structure even
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: hard to ignore. Older sources sometimes describe co-share type and
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: curina or cuarina type societies as paired or mutually balancing organizations.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: Although we have to keep the words sometimes firmly in
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: place because this is exactly the kind of evidence that
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: gets ripped out of one playable context and turned into
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: a supposedly universal Native American cosmology. At SIA, White describes
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: kosherity and quaterina as mutually exclusive in membership while still
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: capable of substituting for another in certain ceremonial duties. The
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: quaterina and kosher appear in a different but related ceremonial relationship.
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: These are not necessarily expressions of one identical theology, but
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: they show that clown societies could exist as structured institutions
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: with defined memberships, chiefs, ceremonial houses, complementary responsibilities, spatial relationships,
• 29:16
  Speaker 1: and ritual obligations rather than as a loose group of
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: performers who simply appeared whenever a ceremony needed comic relief.
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: That point matters because one of the earliest mistakes in
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: studying ritual inversion is assuming that disorder must be structuralist.
• 29:31
  Speaker 1: If somebody behaves contrary, obscene, ridiculous, or unpredictable, we imagine
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: the purpose is to suspend organization for a while. Yet
• 29:39
  Speaker 1: this is behind that behavior could be highly organized. There
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: could be chiefs, doorkeepers, rules governing access to ceremonial houses,
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: mutually exclusive memberships, recognized obligations, expectations concerning who appeared, at
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: which stances, and disciplinary authority over ceremonial participation. The public
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: performance may look spontaneous, but the office producing it is not.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: The clown behaves as though the rules do not apply
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: while occupying a position that exists because rules absolutely do apply.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: Food and appetite begin to make sense inside that larger
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: structure without needing to carry the full argument yet. In
• 30:19
  Speaker 1: an agricultural community, eating is not merely an individual act
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: detached from social life, because storing, sharing, wasting, hoarding, distributing,
• 30:29
  Speaker 1: and consuming food all take place inside networks of labor
• 30:33
  Speaker 1: and obligation. A clown who overeats or dramatizes uncontrolled appetite
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: therefore has access to one of the most immediate forms
• 30:41
  Speaker 1: of social exaggeration available. An ordinary human necessity can be
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: pushed beyond necessity until the audience can see what happens
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: when desire no longer recognizes proportion. We will come back
• 30:54
  Speaker 1: to gluttony directly, because that behavior deserves its own section.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: but the agricultural setting explains why food provides such powerful
• 31:01
  Speaker 1: material for clowning in the first place. This is where
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: Roxanne Swensel's explanation of the clown mocking greed becomes especially valuable,
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: because her account does not require us to manufacture an
• 31:13
  Speaker 1: esoteric symbolic system from the outside. A person behaves greedily,
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: and the clown reflects that behavior back in exaggerated form
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: until the problem becomes visible. Inside a community where survival
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: depends upon cooperation, restraint, labor, and the management of shared resources,
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: that mercury has obvious social force. But the lesson is
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: not that food, possession, or abundance are wrong. Agricultural ceremonial
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: systems repeatedly ask for sufficient rain, successful growth, corn, and
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: enough food to continue. The problem begins when enough disappears
• 31:48
  Speaker 1: as a meaningful limit. That distinction between abundance and excess
• 31:52
  Speaker 1: is much more useful than trying to decode every piece
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: of food shown in clown imagery. Pueblo and native artists
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: have repeatedly represented striped clowns carrying or eating foods such
• 32:03
  Speaker 1: as watermelon and piqui bread, and those images can easily
• 32:06
  Speaker 1: be flattened by outsiders into cute southwest folk art. We
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: should not declare that every watermelon held by a cochere
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: universally symbolizes gluttony, but we can understand why food is
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: such fertile material for ceremonial satire. Everybody understands hunger, everybody
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: understands desire, and everybody understands the moment when wanting becomes
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: too much. The agricultural setting also clarifies why ceremonial order
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: matters so much. If rain, corn, food production, seasonal timing,
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: reciprocal obligation, and communal cooperation are tied to continuity and survival,
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: then the boundaries surrounding ritual are not merely theatrical conventions.
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: Dancers have responsibilities. Spectators have responsibilities. Ceremonial organizations have responsibilities.
• 32:52
  Speaker 1: And the space in which the dance occurs has to
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: be maintained. That makes the clown's position considerably stranger, because
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: the same figure who can parody responsibility, violate ordinary expectations,
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: and behave as though restraint is ridiculous may also be
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: entrusted with protecting the conditions under which the ceremony can continue.
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: And that is where the contradiction we have been building
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: finally becomes physical, because the cochere does not remain the
• 33:17
  Speaker 1: fool forever. In some historical descriptions, when the principal dancers enter,
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: the clowning stops, the grotesque behavior is set aside, and
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: the same person who appeared determined to violate every rule
• 33:29
  Speaker 1: begins clearing space, regulating spectators, assisting dancers, and protecting the
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: ceremonial boundary. This is where we meet the fool who
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: becomes the police. One of the most revealing things about
• 33:42
  Speaker 1: Pueblo's ceremonial clowning is that the same people who seem
• 33:46
  Speaker 1: to spend part of an event doing everything possible to
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: undermine dignity can, under the right circumstances, become the people
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: responsible for protecting ceremonial order. That transformation is not a
• 33:57
  Speaker 1: minor footnote. It is one of the clearest indications that
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: apparent lawlessness is not the same thing as social irresponsibility.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: Historical accounts from Rio Grande playboy communities describe clown groups
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: engaging in horseplay, burlesque, obscene joking, mimicry, and deliberately disruptive
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: behavior during intervals, but when the principal katsina dancing begins,
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: those same figures can shift function almost completely. The clowning stops,
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: the buffoonery is set aside, and the people who had
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: just been acting as though nothing deserved respect become responsible
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: for maintaining the conditions under which the ceremony can proceed correctly.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: Older ethnographic reports describe clowns clearing small stones or debris
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: from the dancing area, preventing spectators from crowding too close,
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: helping preserve the boundary between dancers and audience, and assisting
• 34:47
  Speaker 1: when elements of ceremonial dress become disarranged. In other words,
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: the clown can become kind of a ceremonial policeman or attendant.
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: not in the modern sense of a uniformed officer enforcing
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: criminal law, but in the very real sense that he
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: helps regulate space, movement, and behavior around a sacred performance.
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: That detail matters because it makes it impossible to interpret
• 35:08
  Speaker 1: the clown simply as the person who stands against authority.
• 35:12
  Speaker 1: In these documented settings, the clown possesses authority precisely because
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: the ceremonial system has entrusted him with responsibilities that depend
• 35:21
  Speaker 1: upon judgment, timing, discipline, and social recognition. This is where
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: the idea of sanctioned transgression becomes useful. There is a
• 35:29
  Speaker 1: fundamental difference between someone who breaks rules because they reject
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: the system and somebody who breaks rules because the system
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: has assigned them a role in which temporary rule-breaking performs
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: a recognized function. The co-share or related ceremonial clown may
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: violate expectations of dignity, modesty, politeness, restraint, and ordinary respectable behavior,
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: but that does not place the figure outside social structure.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: The opposite may be true. The clown's apparent disorder can
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: depend upon an institutional structure strong enough to authorize temporary
• 36:01
  Speaker 1: inversion without allowing the ceremony itself to collapse into chaos.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: That means the community is not simply tolerating disorder. It
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: is giving disorder a time, a place, an office, and
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: a boundary. The audience may not know exactly what joke, insult,
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: grotesque gesture, or parody is coming next, but the performer
• 36:21
  Speaker 1: is not some random spectator who wandered into the plaza
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: and decided to start humiliating people. The role exists within
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: a ceremonial organization, and the same person who may cross
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: ordinary boundaries in one moment can be expected to recognize
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: and defend ceremonial boundaries in the next. The practical nature
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: of that responsibility is important because dancers need room to move,
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: ceremonial dress can be elaborate and vulnerable to disruption, crowds
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: can press inward, and loose stones, children, visitors, animals, or
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: inattentive spectators can interfere with the performance. Clearing a dance
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: ground or controlling the edge of a crowd may sound
• 36:59
  Speaker 1: mundane besides sacred narratives of katsinas and emergence, but practical
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: work is precisely what tells us that the clown's office
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: is embedded in the actual functioning of ceremony rather than
• 37:10
  Speaker 1: existing only as a symbolic theater. A person who protects
• 37:13
  Speaker 1: the dancing space is not merely representing order in an
• 37:17
  Speaker 1: abstract sense. He is helping create the physical conditions under
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: which this ceremonial order can happen at all. That gives
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: us one of the most important reversals in the episode.
• 37:27
  Speaker 1: The clown's power does not come from being beyond responsibility.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: It may come from carrying more than one kind of responsibility.
• 37:34
  Speaker 1: During one part of the ceremony, he can dramatize what
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: happens when people ignore restraint, propriety, or obligation. While during
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: another part, he helps make restraint and obligation physically possible.
• 37:46
  Speaker 1: One moment he exaggerates disorder, and the next he contains it.
• 37:50
  Speaker 1: The movement between those roles stop looking contradictory once we
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: abandon the assumption that a religious office has to represent
• 37:57
  Speaker 1: only one moral quality at a time. In fact, that
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: contradiction may be precisely what gives the role its force.
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: Human beings are greedy, sexual, jealous, vain, ridiculous, selfish, gluttonous, competitive,
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: and frequently unable to live up to the values they
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: claim to respect. A religious system can pretend those tendencies
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: do not exist, or it can create a structured place
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: where they are exaggerated, exposed, laughed at, and made visible
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: without allowing them to become the permanent condition of the community,
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: and the ceremonial clown belongs to that second possibility. He
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: performs disorder, but the performance is bounded. He exposes imperfection,
• 38:36
  Speaker 1: but exposure does not require the destruction of the social
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: system surrounding him. This also helps explain why the clown's
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: authority can operate differently from more formal leadership. A chief, elder, priest,
• 38:49
  Speaker 1: or ceremonial leader may represent continuity, memory, instruction, and established responsibility.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: While the clown can sometimes say what formal authority cannot
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: say without damaging its own dignity, he can insult, parody, exaggerate,
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: flatten statues through ridicule, and expose hypocrisy in ways that
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: would sound very different coming from an ordinary official. Yet
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: when the time comes to protect the dance and His
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: actions demonstrate that criticism of the social order does not
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: necessarily equal rejection of the social order. He can mock
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: the structure because he belongs to it. That relationship to
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: power is important because every organized community creates things that
• 39:29
  Speaker 1: are different. to say directly formal authority is usually expected
• 39:34
  Speaker 1: to preserve continuity while criticism threatens continuity by naming what
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: it is failing inside a clown society offers another possibility
• 39:42
  Speaker 1: the system can create an office through which it becomes
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: capable of criticizing itself Ridicule can temporarily destabilize status, expose pretension,
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: and make failure visible without requiring the entire ceremonial structure
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: to become illegitimate. This is why the phrase ceremonial police
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: should not mislead us into imagining that the clown suddenly
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: becomes the opposite of himself. The policing and clowning functions
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: may be two expressions of the same specialized relationship to limits.
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: Sometimes the clown crosses a boundary publicly so everyone can
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: see where the boundary is. Sometimes he protects that boundary
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: physically so the ceremony can continue. In both cases, his
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: authority comes from knowing that limits exist and from being
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: entrusted with the role at the point where those limits
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: become visible. Historical reports also describe clown societies disciplining or
• 40:34
  Speaker 1: correcting people who fail to perform expected ceremonial duties. And
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: in some playboy contexts, ceremonial organizations could compel participation or
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: impose sanctions. The details varied from community to community, and
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: we should not pretend every clown society exercised identical authority.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: But the broader pattern is enough to overturn the idea
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: that these figures were merely religious outsiders tolerated for entertainment.
• 41:01
  Speaker 1: They could be woven into systems of obligation, correction, participation,
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: and communal responsibility that extended far beyond the moments when
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: outsiders saw them making obscene gestures or acting ridiculous in public.
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: Once that institutional authority becomes visible, mockery itself begins to
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: look different. If the clown has no recognized position, ridicule
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: can be dismissed as entertainment. If the clown belongs to
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: an organization that already carries ceremonial responsibilities, ridicule can become
• 41:31
  Speaker 1: a form of social intervention. The joke has more weight
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: because the person making it is not simply trying to
• 41:37
  Speaker 1: get a laugh. He occupies a role through which behavior
• 41:40
  Speaker 1: can be exposed, exaggerated, and reflected back toward the people
• 41:44
  Speaker 1: who already understand exactly what is being referenced. This is
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: also why Roxanne Swensel's explanation of the clown as someone
• 41:52
  Speaker 1: who can show people what they are doing matters here.
• 41:55
  Speaker 1: Ridicule can remain generally funny while still functioning as correction,
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: and performance allows criticism to move through the community differently
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: than it would through direct accusation. That does not mean
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: public ridicule is harmless, and there is no reason to
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: romanticize humiliation simply because it occurs inside a ceremonial system.
• 42:16
  Speaker 1: Being mocked in front of people who know exactly what
• 42:18
  Speaker 1: the joke refers to can hurt, and historical evidence suggests
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: that public opinion and reputation carried real weight in Pueblo communities.
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: The point is not that ceremonial satire is gentle. The
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: point is that it is structurally different from an ordinary
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: insult because the clown's ability to ridicule is connected with
• 42:36
  Speaker 1: an office, a ceremonial context, and responsibilities extending beyond the
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: joke itself. But even that metaphor does not go quite
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: far enough, because he does not merely release tension. He
• 42:47
  Speaker 1: reveals where the tension came from. He can take the greed, vanity, hypocrisy,
• 42:52
  Speaker 1: sexual impropriety, laziness, ridiculous fashion, failed obligations, or village gossip,
• 42:58
  Speaker 1: and magnify them until everybody recognizes the thing that polite
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: conversation had been avoiding. He behaves like the least serious
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: person in the plaza while performing one of the most
• 43:07
  Speaker 1: serious social functions available to a community. making concealed disorder
• 43:12
  Speaker 1: visible before it hardens into something everyone simply learns to
• 43:15
  Speaker 1: live with. And this is where Beetlejuice becomes useful again.
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: Not because the two figures share historical origin, but because
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: Beetlejuice also derives much of his power from behaving as
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: though ordinary categories and boundaries are optional. He can walk
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: into a formal situation and expose how fragile its rules
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: are simply by refusing to respect them. The crucial difference
• 43:37
  Speaker 1: is that Beetlejuice does this for himself. His chaos is selfish, predatory, opportunistic,
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: and uncontrolled, while a ceremonial clown disorder can be socially assigned,
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: institutionally recognized, and bounded by the same system it appears
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: to violate. Beetlejuice breaks the boundary because he wants to.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: The co-share, in specific ceremonial contexts, may cross the boundary
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: because the community has given someone the responsibility of understanding
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: what happens on both sides. Once that responsibility exists, The
• 44:08
  Speaker 1: clown becomes uniquely equipped for another task that formal authority
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: often struggles to perform. He can talk about what everybody
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: already knows but nobody wants to say directly, the embarrassing behavior,
• 44:19
  Speaker 1: the private hypocrisy, the petty greed, the ridiculous fashion, the
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: outsider who thinks nobody notices him, the thing that happened
• 44:26
  Speaker 1: last week that everybody is pretending did not happen. Once
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: chaos has given an office, gossip can enter sacred space.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: Once the clown is understood as someone who can move
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: between ridicule and authority, the use of gossip begins to
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: make much more sense. Because gossip is one of the
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: most powerful forms of social information a community possesses, even
• 44:48
  Speaker 1: when nobody likes admitting that it is information at all.
• 44:51
  Speaker 1: Historical descriptions of Pueblo clowning repeatedly emphasize that performances could
• 44:56
  Speaker 1: draw upon incidents people in the village already knew about,
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: that spectators could be imitated directly, and that recognizable habits
• 45:04
  Speaker 1: or eccentricities could be exaggerated until the entire crowd understood
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: exactly who or what was being referenced. Virginia Moore Roediger's
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: synthesis of Pueblo's ceremonial costume and performance, drawing on earlier observers,
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: specifically describes clown actions as impromptu and notes the use
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: of village gossip and mimicry, including an account from a
• 45:25
  Speaker 1: Santo Domingo dance, in which a clown caricatured a woman
• 45:28
  Speaker 1: in the crowd so accurately that she recognized herself and
• 45:31
  Speaker 1: laughed along with everyone else. The point is not that
• 45:35
  Speaker 1: every Pueblo community used ridicule in the same way, because
• 45:38
  Speaker 1: the source themselves made clear that names, duties, memberships, and
• 45:42
  Speaker 1: ceremonial structures differed from place to place, but the recurring
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: pattern shows that clown performance could absorb the immediate social
• 45:49
  Speaker 1: life of a community and return it to the people
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: in exaggerated form. That makes gossip much more significant than
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: the word usually sounds. We tend to imagine gossip as
• 46:00
  Speaker 1: trivial conversation that happens after important business is finished, but
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: in a small community, it can function as an informal
• 46:07
  Speaker 1: archive of behavior and reputation, preserving knowledge about who fulfills obligations,
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: who avoids them, who gives generously, who takes too much,
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: who has become arrogant, who is embarrassing themselves, who has
• 46:19
  Speaker 1: begun imitating outsiders, and which conflicts everybody knows about even
• 46:24
  Speaker 1: when nobody wants to address them directly. Formal law can
• 46:27
  Speaker 1: tell a community what is prohibited, but gossip records the
• 46:30
  Speaker 1: thousand smaller behaviors through which trust, status, resentment, and reputation
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: actually develop. When a ceremonial clown draws upon that material,
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: something that may have existed only in whispers, private frustration,
• 46:43
  Speaker 1: or ordinary conversation can suddenly become visible in public ritual.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: Roxanne Swinsell's explanation of the co-share, as figures capable of
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: communicating things other people cannot comfortably say, gives us an
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: indigenous explanation of precisely this dynamic. Her example of greed
• 47:00
  Speaker 1: is especially useful, because the clown does not need to
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: walk up to someone and announce a moral charge and
• 47:06
  Speaker 1: demand an explanation. He can embody the problem so completely
• 47:10
  Speaker 1: that the behavior becomes recognizable in grotesque form. Swinsell describes
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: the clowns as helping maintain balance and reflecting back something
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: people need to see about themselves, which means ridicule can
• 47:22
  Speaker 1: work less like a sermon delivered from above and more
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: like a mirror placed in front of the community. The
• 47:27
  Speaker 1: target may laugh along with everybody else and preserve some
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: degree of social dignity, but the message has still landed,
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: and it has landed before an audience that already understands
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: the circumstances from which the joke emerged. That public dimension
• 47:41
  Speaker 1: is what gives the performance its force. Direct accusation allows
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: a person to argue with the accusation, deny the interpretation,
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: or attack whoever delivered it, while caricature can bypass some
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: of those defenses by turning a recognizable habit into a spectacle.
• 47:56
  Speaker 1: A mannerism can be exaggerated, a social failing magnified, a
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: piece of gossip reenacted, or a familiar behavior pushed until
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: the crowd no longer needs an explanation for why it
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: is funny. The joke works because everybody already possesses the
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: missing information. Laughter, therefore, does not erase the criticism. It
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: becomes one of the ways criticism moves through the group.
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: None of this means ceremonial ridicule was harmless, and we
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: should not romanticize public humiliation because it happened inside a
• 48:26
  Speaker 1: religious institution. Historical play-blow ethnography shows that reputation, public opinion,
• 48:33
  Speaker 1: and fear of ridicule could carry real social weight. L.C.
• 48:36
  Speaker 1: Clues-Parson's work on Taos, for example, described public criticism as
• 48:41
  Speaker 1: and the scorn of neighbors as meaningful sanctions, which remind
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: us that becoming the subject of a collective laughter could
• 48:47
  Speaker 1: cut much deeper than an outsider might assume from the
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: word joke. If people whose opinion matter already knew the
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: story behind a performance, then being transformed into the object
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: of ceremonial satire could become a serious social experience even
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: when everyone is laughing. That is precisely why institutional permission matters.
• 49:07
  Speaker 1: because if anyone could publicly humiliate anyone else whenever they wanted,
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: the result would not be social correction, but retaliation, factionalism, resentment,
• 49:16
  Speaker 1: and bullying. The ceremonial clown operates differently. because the role
• 49:20
  Speaker 1: is recognized, bounded, and connected with responsibilities extending beyond ridicule.
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: The same broader historical record that describes grotesque antics, mimicry,
• 49:31
  Speaker 1: and obscene joking also describes disciplinary authority among Koshyiri and Sia,
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: where members could compel participation in in ceremonial duties, punish
• 49:40
  Speaker 1: failures of responsibility, and regulate access to ceremonial houses. The
• 49:45
  Speaker 1: apparently uncontrolled fool therefore exists inside an organization that can
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: itself be highly controlled, and that paradox is exactly what
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: gives the ridicule more weight than an ordinary insult. Seen
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: in that light, gossip can become a ritualized feedback system
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: through which a community takes information already circulating beneath the
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: surface and makes it collectively visible. Human groups constantly accumulate tensions, embarrassments, resentments, failures,
• 50:13
  Speaker 1: and hypocrisies that are difficult to address directly, especially when
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: hierarchy or kinship makes confrontation risky. A figure licensed to
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: exaggerate that behavior can pull some of that material into
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: ceremonial space and return it in a form that is comic, public,
• 50:29
  Speaker 1: and difficult to ignore. The laughter releases tension, but it
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: also identifies where the tension came from. The joke entertains,
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: but it also preserves social memory, and the clown appears
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: to create disorder while exposing quieter forms of disorder that
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: everybody else had learned to walk around. Once that mechanism
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: becomes clear, gluttony stops looking like another random piece of
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: clown business and becomes one of the cleanest examples of
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: how this form of ritual exaggeration works. Eating is necessary,
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: wanting is human, and abundance can be a blessing, but
• 51:01
  Speaker 1: appetite can be pushed beyond necessity until greed becomes visible
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: in the body itself. That is where the clown's social
• 51:08
  Speaker 1: mirror turns toward the person who always wants more. Once
• 51:12
  Speaker 1: we begin looking at appetite through the agricultural and social
• 51:15
  Speaker 1: world we have already established, gluttony stops looking like a
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: random piece of clown behavior and becomes one of the
• 51:21
  Speaker 1: clearest examples of how sacred clowning can turn an ordinary
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: human need into a public lesson about excess. Eating is necessary,
• 51:30
  Speaker 1: storing food is rational, abundance is desirable, and wanting enough
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: to survive another season is not a moral failure. but
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: the clown can take that ordinary need and push it
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: beyond proportion until the audience sees the moment when necessity
• 51:43
  Speaker 1: becomes appetite without limit. Historical and museum descriptions repeatedly associate
• 51:49
  Speaker 1: Pueblo clown figures with excessive eating, loudness, bodily exaggeration, and
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: other forms of immediate behavior, while modern artistic representations often
• 51:59
  Speaker 1: show cashier or related clowns carrying food such as watermelon
• 52:03
  Speaker 1: and piqui bread. One useful example, comes from the Gorman
• 52:07
  Speaker 1: Museum's description of a seated cochere carving which depicts the
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: figure holding a slice of watermelon in one hand and
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: a roll of piqui bread in the other. The museum
• 52:16
  Speaker 1: places the work within the broader Pueblo clown tradition and
• 52:20
  Speaker 1: emphasizes the ceremonial importance of figures whose behavior may include
• 52:23
  Speaker 1: excess and disruption. We should not turn that into a
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: universal code in which watermelon automatically means gluttony or piqui
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: carries one fixed theological meaning because individual artworks have their
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: own context and artists make their own choices. But the
• 52:38
  Speaker 1: recurring association between food and clown imagery makes sense once
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: we understand how useful appetite is a medium for exaggeration.
• 52:46
  Speaker 1: A greedy person can call greed prudence, a selfish person
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: can describe hoarding as preparation, and somebody who always takes
• 52:53
  Speaker 1: the largest share can convince themselves that they simply happen
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: to need more. But the clown can take the logic
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: of wanting and push it until rationalization collapses. Once the
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: body is grabbing too much, Demanding too much, eating too much,
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: or behaving though there can never be enough, the audience
• 53:10
  Speaker 1: no longer has to debate the abstract meaning of greed
• 53:13
  Speaker 1: because greed has been given a body and made ridiculous.
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: Swencil's example of greed becomes especially useful here because it
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: shows that the lesson comes through embodiment rather than sermonizing.
• 53:25
  Speaker 1: Instead of formally accusing someone of selfishness, the clown can
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: perform accumulation and appetite until the behavior becomes unmistakable. using
• 53:33
  Speaker 1: the same mechanism we have already seen with gossip and
• 53:36
  Speaker 1: public ridicule. What people normally conceal beneath excuse is made
• 53:40
  Speaker 1: visible enough that everyone can see it, including the person
• 53:43
  Speaker 1: being mocked. The agricultural context adds one important tension without
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: needing to carry the whole argument again. A ceremonial world
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: concerned with successful crops, sufficient rain, and enough food for
• 53:55
  Speaker 1: continuity is not hostile to abundance. Abundance is desirable. The
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: problem appears when the idea of enough disappears and appetite
• 54:04
  Speaker 1: becomes detached from obligation, restraint, or the needs of other people.
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: That distinction is more useful than treating every image of
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: a clown with food as a hidden symbolic cipher. Food
• 54:15
  Speaker 1: works because everybody understands hunger. Everybody understands wanting, and everybody
• 54:20
  Speaker 1: understands the moment when wanting begins to look grotesque. That
• 54:23
  Speaker 1: is also where the comparison with Beetlejuice becomes useful again,
• 54:27
  Speaker 1: because Beetlejuice is almost entirely appetite without restraint. He wants success, attention, control, sex, recognition,
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: and entry into the world of the living. And he
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: pursues those desires with the same refusal of limits that
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: makes him funny and dangerous. The resemblance is not simply
• 54:44
  Speaker 1: that both figures can be associated with excess. It is
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: that uncontrolled wanting becomes a way of showing what happens
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: when when someone no longer accepts the boundaries regulating everyone else.
• 54:55
  Speaker 1: The difference, again, is the point. Beetlejuice's appetite serves Beetlejuice,
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: while the ceremonial clown's exaggerated appetite can serve the community
• 55:04
  Speaker 1: by turning excess into something visible, laughable, and socially intelligible.
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: One figure violates limits for himself, while the other can
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: violate them because the ritual office gives that violation a purpose.
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: And once appetite has been pushed that far, Food is
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: only one boundary left to cross. The same logic that
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: makes overeating useful as public exaggeration can be applied to sexuality,
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: bodily functions, and every other area where communities establish strong
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: rules about what should remain controlled, private, respectable, or unspoken.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: That is where ceremonial clowning becomes the things outsiders historically
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: had the hardest time understanding. If gluttony gives the ceremonial
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: clown a way to exaggerate appetite, Sexuality and bodily obscenity
• 55:49
  Speaker 1: gives him access to an even more heavily regulated part
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: of social life, because every community establishes boundaries about what
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: can be shown publicly, what can be said openly, what
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: sexual behavior is appropriate, which bodily functions should remain private,
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: and what forms of conduct are compatible with dignity. Historical
• 56:08
  Speaker 1: observers of Pueblo Clowning recorded performances involving sexual pantomime, obscene jokes,
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: scatological humor, grotesque gestures, exaggerated bodily behavior, and other deliberate
• 56:19
  Speaker 1: violations of ordinary decorum. And there is no reason to
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: sanitize those descriptions simply because the figures involved are sacred.
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: The more important question is what the obscenity is doing
• 56:30
  Speaker 1: inside the ceremonial system, because representing an indecent act is
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: not the same thing as endorsing it. And a clown
• 56:37
  Speaker 1: who performs impropriety may be making the boundary visible precisely
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: because everyone watching already knows that the behavior violates an expectation.
• 56:46
  Speaker 1: That distinction became especially important when outsiders tried to explain
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: Pueblo religion through their own moral categories. A clown who
• 56:54
  Speaker 1: overeats until greed becomes ridiculous is relatively easy for an
• 56:58
  Speaker 1: observer to recognize as caricature, while a religious figure making
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: a sexual gesture could collide immediately with Christian assumptions about morality, paganism, primitiveness,
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: and what legitimate religion was supposed to look like. During
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: the late 19th and early 20th centuries, missionaries, reformers, Anthropologists, tourists,
• 57:18
  Speaker 1: and federal officials were all participating in arguments over Pueblo
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: ceremonial life. And Tisa Wegner's study of the 1920s Pueblo
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: dance controversy shows how allegations of sexual mortality became entangled
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: with a much larger political structure over whether Pueblo ceremonies
• 57:35
  Speaker 1: would be recognized as religion at all. This is where
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: the evidence has to be handled with extreme care, because
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: the historical record contains two very different things that outsiders
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: repeatedly blurred together, documented instances of ritual obscenity in some
• 57:51
  Speaker 1: clown performances, and sensational allegations about secret indigenous ceremonies for
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: which there was no reliable evidence. Wenger discusses rumors surrounding
• 58:01
  Speaker 1: the closed Blue Lake ceremony at Taos that included claims
• 58:04
  Speaker 1: of sexual orgies, coercion, cannibalism, and even human sacrifice. And
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: she notes that later anthropological work did not support those
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: accusations and instead emphasized sexual continence during important Pueblo religious observances.
• 58:19
  Speaker 1: The existence of a sexual parody in one's ceremonial context, therefore,
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: cannot be used as retroactive evidence that hidden Pueblo ceremonies
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: elsewhere contain sexual rites. That leap is exactly how culturally
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: specific ritual behavior became raw material for an outsider fantasy
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: about native religion. and sounds a lot like how conspiracy
• 58:39
  Speaker 1: theorists connect their dots. The political consequences were not theoretical,
• 58:44
  Speaker 1: because in 1921, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles Burke issued
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: Circular No. 1665 on Indian dancing after missionary complaints about
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: ceremonies they considered immoral, degrading, or excessive. Directing federal agents
• 59:00
  Speaker 1: to discourage or suppress dances they judge objectionable through educational
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: pressure and, where necessary, punitive measures. A supplement issued two
• 59:10
  Speaker 1: years later proposed even more intrusive restrictions on frequency, duration,
• 59:16
  Speaker 1: and participation. The resulting conflict forced playable leaders and their
• 59:20
  Speaker 1: allies to argue publicly that these ceremonies were not in
• 59:24
  Speaker 1: decent entertainment but religious practices, and that the federal government
• 59:28
  Speaker 1: had no legitimate authority to suppress them simply because they
• 59:32
  Speaker 1: did not resemble Protestant worship. Wenger's larger point matters enormously
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: here because the controversy was not merely a dispute over
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: whether one performance crossed the sexual line. It was a
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: struggle over who had the authority to define another people's religion.
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: If federal officials could observe a ceremony, interpret unfamiliar gestures
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: through Christian moral assumptions, classify those gestures as evidence of indecency,
• 59:58
  Speaker 1: and then use that interpretation To justify suppression, the problem
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 1: was no longer misunderstanding alone. Interpretation had become a tool
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: of power. The sacred clown sits directly in the middle
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 1: of that problem because ritual inversion is almost designed to
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: confuse anybody who refuses to distinguish between performance and prescription.
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 1: If a clown exaggerates greed, the community is not being
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: instructed to become greedy. If he behaves like a fool,
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: stupidity has not become a religious virtue. If he mocks authority,
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: all authority has not been abolished, and if he performs
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: sexual impropriety, the act does not automatically describe acceptable sexual
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: behavior outside the ceremonial setting. Transgression only works as transgression
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: when boundary already exists, which means the obscene gesture may
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 1: depend upon the audience understanding the norm strong enough to
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: recognize what is being violated. That is what makes the
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: sacred clown so difficult to translate into simple western categories.
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: He can embody the profane without ceasing to belong to
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: the sacred, and the obscenity can become meaningful precisely because
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 1: it occurs inside a ceremonial structure capable of containing it.
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: An outsider who sees only sexual gesture can miss the
• 1:01:10
  Speaker 1: institution surrounding it, the audience that understands the reference, the
• 1:01:15
  Speaker 1: timing that determines when clowning is permitted, the responsibilities that
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 1: return when the principal dancing begins, and the larger religious
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: world in which temporary inversion has been given a place.
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 1: The mistake is not simply failing to understand the joke.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: It is assuming that because the clown temporarily breaks the rule,
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: the community must not have had the rule in the
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: first place. And that misunderstanding is exactly where part two
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: has to go. Because once missionaries, federal officials, anthropologists, artists,
• 1:01:45
  Speaker 1: and tourists began arguing over what Pueblo ceremonies meant, the
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: sacred clown became part of a much larger struggle over
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: religious freedom, cultural survival, secrecy, representation, and the right of
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 1: outsiders to decide what another's people's sacred behavior was allowed
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 1: to mean. By this point, the black and white stripes
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: that pulled us into the story have almost become the
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: least interesting thing about it, because what began as bizarre
• 1:02:11
  Speaker 1: visual resemblance to Beetlejuice has opened into a ceremonial world
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 1: in which the clown refuses nearly every category we try
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: to place around him. The Kosher can appear ridiculous without
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: being trivial, obscene without existing outside religion, disruptive without being
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: socially useless, and contrary without simply rejecting the community whose
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: rules he temporarily violates. He can exaggerate greed until appetite
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: becomes grotesque, drag gossip and recognizable behavior into public performance,
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 1: ridicule people who may otherwise be difficult to confront, participate
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: in narratives of loss and restoration, move through ceremonial systems
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: tied to corn, rain, seasonal continuity, and sacred beings. And,
• 1:02:54
  Speaker 1: when the moment changes, stop acting like the least responsible
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 1: person in the plaza and help protect the physical and
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 1: ceremonial order of the dance. That is the contradiction I
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: want to leave hanging at the end of Part 1.
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 1: Because saying that the clown represents chaos is not quite enough.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: Uncontrolled chaos does not usually come with membership, obligation, timing,
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 1: recognized authority, ceremonial responsibility, disciplinary power, or a clear point
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: at which the clowning is expected to stop. What we
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: have been looking at instead is something much stranger. Disorder
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: given a place inside order, mockery given a legitimate social function,
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: obscenity placed inside sacred structure, and the person who crosses
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 1: boundaries sometimes becoming one of the people responsible for making
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: those boundaries visible in the first place. The dance is
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: not purified by removing the fool, because in the Cochiti narrative,
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: we examine that dance is not right without him. And
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: that single idea may tell us more about sacred clowning
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: than any attempt to decode the stripes of it could.
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 1: By the moment outsiders entered this world, watched the gestures
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: without understanding the institution, recorded obscenity without understanding inversion, and
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: decided that their own categories were sufficient to explain what
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: they were seeing, the clown became part of another story entirely.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: In Part 2, we are going directly into that collision.
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: Federal Campaigns Against Playboy Dancers The so-called secret dance file,
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: missionary accusations, indigenous resistance, artists who showed outsiders only what
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: they chose to show, boundaries around ceremonial knowledge, the deeper
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: archaeological possibility that organized clown institutions reach far back into
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: the pre-contact Southwest. And finally, the question that started this
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: whole thing in the first place. Because once we understand
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: what it means to give chaos a sacred job, Beetlejuice
• 1:04:46
  Speaker 1: is going to look a little different. And that's the
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: end of another Occult Rejects. Hope you all enjoyed, and
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: until the next one.