Latest / The Occult Rejects / Beetlejuice and The Sacred Clown Part 2: History, Restriction, Misinterpretation, and a Deeper Connection

Transcript

Beetlejuice and The Sacred Clown Part 2: History, Restriction, Misinterpretation, and a Deeper Connection · The Occult Rejects

• 0:02
  Speaker 1: You see, something's going to happen.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: What? What's going to happen?
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Something wonderful.
• 0:17
  Speaker 2: What? I understand how you feel.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: You see, it's all very clear to me now. Welcome
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: back to the Occult Rejects. In part one, we started
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: with a visual resemblance that looked almost too strange to ignore.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: Because the black and white stripes, altered face, grotesque humor, appetite, obscenity,
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: and disruptive behavior associated with Pueblo ceremonial clowns can make
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: the first encounter with Kosher or Kosa imagery feel uncannily
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  Speaker 1: familiar to anyone who has Beetlejuice burned into their brain.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: What began as a question about appearance, however, became something
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: much more important, because the deeper we went into the
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: historical and ceremonial material, the less useful it became to
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: think of these figures as entertainers who happened to be
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  Speaker 1: standing near a religious dance. Depending upon the Pueblo community
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  Speaker 1: and period, we found organized clown societies connected with ceremonial responsibility, agriculture,
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  Speaker 1: Katsina traditions, social criticism, disciplinary authority, and the practical maintenance
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: of ceremonial space, while Cochiti narratives placed the co-share inside
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: stories of disappearance, recovery, and ceremonial completeness. By the end
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  Speaker 1: of Part 1, the stripes have become almost secondary to
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  Speaker 1: the stranger's realization that the clown who appears to violate
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  Speaker 1: order may also.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: Be one of the people through whom order is maintained.
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  Speaker 1: That is where Part 2 begins, because once we accept
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: that possibility, the question changes from what the clown does
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  Speaker 1: to what happens when somebody outside the ceremonial system watches
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  Speaker 1: him doing it and assumes they understand what they are seeing.
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: The community may know that ridicule is corrective, obscenity is contextual,
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  Speaker 1: Exaggerated appetite can become satire and contrary behavior can exist
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  Speaker 1: inside a bounded ceremonial office. But none of that meaning
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  Speaker 1: is automatically visible to an outsider carrying a notebook, a camera,
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: a missionary agenda, or a federal badge. If that observer
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  Speaker 1: sees a sexual gesture and records only sexual immorality, sees
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: ridicule and records disorder, sees secrecy and assumes depravity, or
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  Speaker 1: sees a ceremony that does not resemble Protestant worship and
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: therefore concludes that it is not religion at all, Then
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: the problem has moved far beyond misunderstanding a joke. Interpretation
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: becomes judgment, judgment becomes policy, and policy can become coercion.
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: By the 1920s, that is exactly what had happened. Tisa
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: Wenger's work on Pueblo dance controversy shows federal officials, missionaries,
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  Speaker 1: reform organizations, anthropologists, artists, tourists, and Pueblo people themselves struggling
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: over whether Pueblo ceremonies should be described as religion, custom, superstition, immorality,
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  Speaker 1: public spectacle, or something else entirely. And the category chosen
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  Speaker 1: mattered because it could determine whether ceremonies were defended under
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  Speaker 1: the language of religious freedom or targeted as the behavior
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  Speaker 1: the government believed it had the authority to suppress. Pueblo
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: leaders and their allies successfully resisted major attempts to curtail
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: the dances. But Wenger's argument is more complicated than a
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  Speaker 1: simple story in which religious liberty defeated persecution. because defending
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: Pueblo practices as religion often required translating communal obligations, ceremonies, governance,
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  Speaker 1: land relationships, and social institutions in a Euro-American category shaped
• 3:37
  Speaker 1: heavily by Protestant assumptions. Even winning the argument could require
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: Pueblo people to explain their tradition inside conceptual boundaries created
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: by the same society that had attempted to regulate them.
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: The sacred clown becomes especially vulnerable inside that struggle because
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: ceremonial inversion can look like evidence against religion to an
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  Speaker 1: observer who has already decided that true religion must be solemn, restrained,
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  Speaker 1: morally instructional in an obvious way, and separated from humor, sex, ridicule,
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  Speaker 1: and grotesque behavior. A clown parroting greed inside a community
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  Speaker 1: that understands the performance can become, in an outsider report,
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  Speaker 1: evidence of disorder. An obscene gesture can become evidence of
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  Speaker 1: sexual degeneracy. Secrecy can be proof that something depraved must
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  Speaker 1: be happening beyond public view. The same figure who can
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: expose hypocrisy from within the community can therefore be transformed
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: from outside into evidence used against the community itself. That
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: brings us into one of the darkest ironies in the story,
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  Speaker 1: because some of the outsiders most fascinated by Pueblo ceremonial
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  Speaker 1: life were also part of a culture that continually demanded
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: access to it. Anthropologists wanted descriptions, collectors wanted objects, tourists
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  Speaker 1: wanted photographs, missionaries wanted explanations or confessions, government officials wanted reports,
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: and later spiritual seekers would want secrets. While Playboy communities
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  Speaker 1: maintained their own boundaries around what belonged in public, what
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  Speaker 1: belonged to particular societies, and what did not belong to
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  Speaker 1: outsiders at all. The history of sacred clowning is therefore
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  Speaker 1: inseparable from a larger struggle over who has the right
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  Speaker 1: to look, record, interpret, publish, display, imitate, purchase, or explain
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  Speaker 1: somebody else's religion and whether seeing something ever gives the
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  Speaker 1: observer ownership over what it means. That question will follow
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: us through our series Paintings, Modern Restrictions Around Ceremonial Knowledge,
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  Speaker 1: and the museum collections that can physically possess an object
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  Speaker 1: without necessarily possessing the authority to disclose everything connected with it.
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  Speaker 1: From there, we will have to separate the Kosher from
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  Speaker 1: other ceremonial clown complexes such as the Koyamshi, resist the
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  Speaker 1: familiar attempt to collapse Pueblo Clowning into Lakota Hayoka, and
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  Speaker 1: finally ask how far back organized clown institutions may extend
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: into the pre-contact Southwest and Northern Mexico. Only after all that,
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: we are bringing Beetlejuice back, because by then the question
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  Speaker 1: is no longer why two figures happen to wear black
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  Speaker 1: and white. The historical answer remains that we have no
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  Speaker 1: evidence Beetlejuice was created from the Kosher, but the structural
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: comparison becomes much stronger once we understand the difference between
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  Speaker 1: chaos that has escaped every boundary and disorder that has
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: been given boundaries, obligations, timing, and a ceremonial job to perform.
• 6:33
  Speaker 1: Part one showed us the clown who breaks the rules.
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  Speaker 1: Part two is about the people who tried to decide
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  Speaker 1: what those broken rules meant and what happened when their
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  Speaker 1: interpretation acquired the power of the state. Part one showed
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: us how easily ritual obscenity can be misunderstood once it
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: is pulled away from the ceremonial structure that gives it meaning.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: The so-called sacred dance file shows what happens when the
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: misunderstanding is collected, circulated through bureaucracy, and eventually converted into
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  Speaker 1: federal policy. The file was not a Pueblo document or
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: a neutral archive created by indigenous religious authorities explaining their
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: own ceremonies. It was a collection of outsider reports, allegations, rumors, observations,
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  Speaker 1: and descriptions assembled inside a political environment already saturated with
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: missionary hostility toward practices that did not fit Christian expectations
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  Speaker 1: of religion. Tisa Wegner's work on the 1920s Pueblo dance
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  Speaker 1: controversy shows this material circulating among officials and reformers preoccupied
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: with sexuality, secrecy, paganism, and the fear that ceremonial dancing
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  Speaker 1: obstructed assimilation. Behaviors that made sense only inside a specific
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  Speaker 1: ritual context could therefore be stripped from that context and
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  Speaker 1: turned into evidence that native ceremonial life was immoral, socially destructive,
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  Speaker 1: and something the United States government had a responsibility to control.
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  Speaker 1: The phase Secret Dance File sounds almost theatrical now, but
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  Speaker 1: the name captures something important about the outsider imagination surrounding
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  Speaker 1: Pueblo religion during this period, because secrecy itself could become suspicious.
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: If a ceremony was closed to outsiders, some observers did
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  Speaker 1: not conclude that a community possessed legitimate boundaries around sacred knowledge.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: They concluded that whatever happened beyond public view must conceal
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  Speaker 1: something shameful. Wenger documents sensational stories about secret Pueblo ceremonies
• 8:31
  Speaker 1: involving sexual misconduct and other alleged forms of depravity for
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: which later investigators found little or no evidence. While genuinely,
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: public clown performances involving obscenity or parody could make those
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  Speaker 1: fantasies seem plausible to people already inclined to believe them.
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  Speaker 1: Real ritual inversion and invented scandal could therefore be placed
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: side by side until the distinction became documented performance and
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: outsider projection began to disappear. That distortion mattered because the
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: Office of Indian Affairs was not simply another observer writing
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: down impressions. It possessed administrative power over Native communities, and
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: Commissioner of Indian Affairs Charles H. Burke used that power
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  Speaker 1: directly in 1921 when he issued Circular No. 1665, Indian Dancing.
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  Speaker 1: The Circular instructed federal agents to discourage or suppress any
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  Speaker 1: Berks' directive did not emerge from nowhere. Wenger connects the
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  Speaker 1: campaign to missionary complaints about alleged immoralities among Pueblo and
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  Speaker 1: Hopi people. While the larger controversy shows how material gathered
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: through this secret dance file helped create an atmosphere in
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  Speaker 1: which federal intervention could be presented as reform rather than
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  Speaker 1: religious suppression. Outsider interpretation had now crossed into the machinery
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  Speaker 1: of the state. The logic behind the policy tells us
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  Speaker 1: almost as much about the United States as it does
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  Speaker 1: about Pueblo dancing, because Burke and the reformers supporting restrictions
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  Speaker 1: were operating within an assimilationist model of respectable American life.
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  Speaker 1: Ceremonies could be condemned not only because officials considered them
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  Speaker 1: sexually immoral, but because they supposedly consumed too much time,
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  Speaker 1: interfered with wage labor or schooling, encouraged redistributive practices such
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  Speaker 1: as giveaways, maintained what officials called superstition, and reinforced communal
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  Speaker 1: loyalties that assimilation policy was attempting to weaken. The dance
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  Speaker 1: was therefore threatening on several levels at once. It preserved
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  Speaker 1: religious practices missionaries wanted replaced, maintained institutions that did not
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  Speaker 1: depend upon federal authority, and reinforced relationships among people, land, ceremony,
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  Speaker 1: and community that resisted the expectation that indigenous life should
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  Speaker 1: dissolve into individualized citizenship. Two years later, in 1923, the
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  Speaker 1: campaign became even more intrusive when Burke issued a supplement
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  Speaker 1: recommending severe restrictions on Native dancing, including proposals limiting frequency, duration,
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  Speaker 1: time of day, and participation. Among the suggested restrictions were
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  Speaker 1: age limitations that could have excluded people under 50 from
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  Speaker 1: certain dances. Implementation varied, and federal agents themselves did not
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  Speaker 1: always agree with Washington's assumptions. But the implications were staggering.
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  Speaker 1: A government official was claiming authority not merely to judge
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  Speaker 1: whether a native religious practice was acceptable, but to determine
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  Speaker 1: its schedule, conditions, and general participation. When ceremonial knowledge is
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  Speaker 1: transmitted through participation, Restricting younger people is not simply crowd control.
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  Speaker 2: It threatens transmission itself.
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  Speaker 1: That is why the controversy cannot be reduced to a
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  Speaker 1: historical argument about whether missionaries approved of dancing.
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  Speaker 2: It belonged to a larger assault.
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  Speaker 1: On indigenous institutions by a government that had already attacked
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  Speaker 1: native languages, communal landholding, systems of education, religious specialists, kinship structures,
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  Speaker 1: and local forms of authority. boarding schools removed children from
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  Speaker 1: the communities in which traditions were learned, allotment policy broke
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  Speaker 1: apart communal land systems, missions pursued conversion, and federal agents
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  Speaker 1: frequently treated indigenous ceremonial leadership as competition with the state.
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  Speaker 1: Against that background, regulating a dance could become another way
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  Speaker 1: of regulating who possessed the authority to define time, obligation, morality,
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  Speaker 1: and community. The Sacred Clown makes the violence of that
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  Speaker 1: translation especially clear because his ceremonial power depends upon context.
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  Speaker 2: A co-share exaggerating greed before.
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  Speaker 1: People who understand the performance is not the same event
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  Speaker 1: as a federal official reading a description of grotesque behavior
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  Speaker 1: in an office hundreds of miles away. A sexual joke
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  Speaker 1: performed inside a bounded ritual setting is not the same
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  Speaker 1: thing as an allegation that a secret ceremony is an orgy.
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  Speaker 1: And a figure who behaves contrary to ordinary expectations under
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  Speaker 1: the authority of a ceremonial society is not evidence that
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  Speaker 1: the society lacks discipline, especially when the historical record also
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: shows clown organization exercising discipline themselves. Buretic description can strip
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  Speaker 1: away timing, audience, relationship, institutional role, and indigenous interpretation until
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  Speaker 1: an act stands alone as apparent proof of whatever the
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  Speaker 1: observer already feared. That is one reason the category of
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  Speaker 1: religion became so politically important during the controversy.
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: Pueblo leaders and their non-Native.
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  Speaker 1: Allies increasingly argued that the dances were religious ceremonies and
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  Speaker 1: therefore deserved protection under American ideals of religious liberty, forcing
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  Speaker 1: federal authorities and the public to confront the contradiction between
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: celebrating freedom of religion and suppressing indigenous ceremonial life. Wenger's
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  Speaker 1: central argument, however, is that this victory carried a complication.
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: Euro-American concepts of religion often imagined a distinct sphere of
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: belief and worship separated from politics, economics, land, governance, and
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  Speaker 1: ordinary social organization. Playboy's ceremonial life did not necessarily divide
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: itself among those lines, so defending the dances as religion
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  Speaker 1: could require translating a much more integrated system of obligations
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: and relationships into a category the American legal and political
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  Speaker 1: system was prepared to recognize. The Sacred Clown is almost
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  Speaker 1: designed to expose the limits of that category. He can
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  Speaker 1: be funny and religious, disciplinary and obscene, agricultural and politically meaningful,
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  Speaker 1: embedded in sacred narrative while also mocking somebody's behavior from
• 14:44
  Speaker 1: last week, and connected with institutions that can touch ceremony, governance,
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: social correction, and communal obligation at the same time. To
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  Speaker 1: an administrative system determined to decide whether something is religion, entertainment, policing, comedy, medicine,
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  Speaker 1: or politics, the clown becomes difficult because the answer may
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  Speaker 1: be several of those things at once. The American state
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: wanted categories it could administer, but Pueblo's ceremonial life did
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: not owe the American state the courtesy of becoming conceptually simple.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: The secret dance file therefore matters for reasons far beyond
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: its sensational reputation, because it marks a moment when observation
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: became possession and interpretation became authority. Outsiders collected descriptions of
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: ceremonies and decided what those descriptions meant, circulated their interpretations
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: through institutions with coercive power, and used the resulting archive
• 15:37
  Speaker 1: to help justify restrictions on the people who actually belonged
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: to the traditions being described. The clown who could expose
• 15:44
  Speaker 1: arrogance inside the community was now confronted with a much
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: larger arrogance outside it. The assumption that watching another people's
• 15:51
  Speaker 1: ritual gave the observer the right to define it. And
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: that is exactly why the next part of the story
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: belongs to someone who learned how to be seen without
• 15:58
  Speaker 1: necessarily allowing outsiders to see everything. The struggle over Pueblo's
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: ceremonial life did not end with federal circulars and missionary reports,
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: because one of the deeper conflicts involves something much more
• 16:10
  Speaker 1: difficult to regulate, representation itself. By the early 20th century,
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: Pueblo painters were increasingly producing works for audiences far beyond
• 16:20
  Speaker 1: their own communities. and those audiences were hungry for images
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  Speaker 1: that seemed to offer direct access to an indigenous world
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  Speaker 1: they considered ancient, exotic, and spiritually mysterious. Collectors wanted dancers,
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  Speaker 1: ceremonial figures, casinas, hunting scenes, and recognizable signs of Pueblo identity.
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: While museums and anthropologists often treated those images almost as
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: ethnographic evidence, as though a painting made by a Pueblo
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: artist could be read like a transparent diagram of Pueblo's religion.
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  Speaker 1: That assumption is exactly what makes our sire so important,
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  Speaker 1: because his work demonstrates that visibility does not necessarily equal disclosure,
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: and that an indigenous artist can show an outsider a
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  Speaker 1: ceremonial figure without surrendering everything the outsider imagines the image contains.
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: Our sire, also known as Alfonso Roybal, was a Pueblo
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  Speaker 1: artist born in 1898 who became one of the best-known
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  Speaker 1: indigenous painters in North America during the first half of
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: the 20th century. and his career unfolded precisely when federal
• 17:19
  Speaker 1: assimilation policy and attempts to suppress indigenous ceremonial practices were
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: colliding with a growing commercial appetite for southwestern native art.
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: The National Gallery of Art notes that his work circulated
• 17:32
  Speaker 1: widely during his lifetime, traveling to major American cities and
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: even to Europe, while his paintings repeatedly engaged important aspects
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: of Pueblo life, including the striped cosa figures that concern
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: us here. One of the strongest surviving examples is Tu Cosa,
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: painted around 1925, in which two black and white striped
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: ceremonial clowns occupy the page with the visual vocabulary that
• 17:56
  Speaker 1: first pulled us into the entire investigation.
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  Speaker 2: The date matters.
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  Speaker 1: Around 1925, an image of two Pueblo sacred clowns was
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: entering the American art market at almost exactly the same
• 18:08
  Speaker 1: historical moment when the Office of Indian Affairs had been
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: attempting to restrict Pueblo dances and outsiders were arguing over
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: whether those ceremonies were represented religion, superstition, immortality, or public spectacle.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: The National Gallery has suggested that our size-unusually-frequently depiction of
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: Xhosa may itself have functioned as a form of resistance
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: to federal efforts to suppress dances and dismantle native cultural practices,
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: which gives the paintings a political dimension easy to miss
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: if we treat them merely as beautiful records of ceremonial costume.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: A stripped clown circulating among non-playboy collectors could do more
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: than document a tradition. The image can insist upon the
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: continued presence of a tradition that federal policy had attempted
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: to discipline or erase. What makes our sire especially useful
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: for this episode is that modern scholarship does not portray
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: him as handing outsiders an unrestricted window into Pueblo's ceremonial life.
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: The National Gallery explicitly notes that when painting Pueblo subjects,
• 19:09
  Speaker 1: he could protect sacred knowledge from non-Pueblo audiences by omitting
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: or altering details. which means the image can reveal and
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: withhold at the same time. A collector could own the paper,
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: hang it on a wall, reproduce it in a catalog,
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: and imagine that possession of the object meant possession of
• 19:26
  Speaker 1: the knowledge represented by it, while the artist remained the
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: person who had decided how much information the image actually disclosed.
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: That distinction matters because the history we have been following
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: is filled with outsiders confusing access with authority. A missionary
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: witnesses part of a dance and assumes he understands its theology.
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: An anthropologist records a story and assumes publication makes it
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: unrestricted property. A government official reads an allegation and assumes
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: he has enough knowledge to.
• 19:54
  Speaker 2: Regulate a ceremony.
• 19:55
  Speaker 1: A tourist sees a dancer and assumes the spectacle exists
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: for observation. Hawassiah's work demonstrates another possibility. An indigenous artist
• 20:04
  Speaker 1: can deliberately participate in the market created by outsider fascination
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: or while preserving the right not to explain everything. The
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: viewer receives an image, but the image does not owe
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: the viewer total transparency. This is where the concept scholars
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: sometimes describe as survivance becomes useful, provided we do not
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: let the terminology become more important than the people it describes.
• 20:28
  Speaker 1: The National Gallery uses the term in discussing our sire
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: and other Pueblo artists to emphasize survival, resistance, continuity, an
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: active presence rather than the old colonial fantasy that indigenous
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: cultures belong only to the past. Sire was not preserving
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: a dead ceremonial world after its disappearance. He was painting
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: while those traditions remained alive, while federal officials were attempting
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: to regulate them, and while Playboy communities were deciding how
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: cultural continuity would be maintained under enormous pressure. His work, therefore,
• 21:00
  Speaker 1: does not merely say that Playboy traditions once existed. Its
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: very production says that Pueblo people continued to determine how
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: those traditions would be represented in the present. There is
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: something especially appropriate about Tecosa becoming one of the figures
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: through which that negotiation occurs, because the ceremonial clown already
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: possesses a complicated relationship to visibility. He attacks attention through
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: extreme appearance and public behavior, yet the outsider who sees
• 21:27
  Speaker 1: the stripes still does not necessarily understand the office, the
• 21:31
  Speaker 1: social relationships, the ceremonial obligations, or any restricted knowledge behind them.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: Our sire reproduces that asymmetry on paper. The outsider sees
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: enough to become fascinated, but fascination does not erase the boundary.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: A painting can show the figure without completely explaining the figure,
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: just as a public ceremonial appearance can be visible without
• 21:51
  Speaker 1: making every dimension of the ceremony public knowledge. That point
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: also changes how we should think about museums, because many
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: of the objects and images through which modern audiences encounter
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: Pueblo religion entered collections through relationships involving tourism, anthropology, private collecting,
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: art markets, and institutions with far more economic and political
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: power than the communities being represented. The fact that Tukosa
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: eventually entered the Corcoran collection and later the National Gallery
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: does not reduce Sire to a passive victim of collecting.
• 22:23
  Speaker 1: He was a professional artist making deliberate choices within that market.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: What museum display can create, however, is an illusion of
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: total availability. An object sits under glass or appears online.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: And because we can see it, we begin to feel
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: that everything connected with it must also be available for explanation, reproduction,
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: and use. Pueblo communities have repeatedly rejected that assumption. Seeing
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: a dance does not mean possessing the ceremony. Seeing a
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: kiva does not create a right to enter it. And
• 22:54
  Speaker 1: seeing a ceremonial figure represented in art does not grant
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: access to restricted knowledge associated with that figure. Hauasaya's practice
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: gives us an early 20th century artistic version of that
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: principle because he could make Pueblo life visible by controlling
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: the depth of outsider access, turning omission from something an
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: earlier curator might have labeled inaccuracy into something far more important,
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: sovereignty over representation. That brings us directly into the next
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: part of the story, because once we recognize that indigenous
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: artists could actively control what outsiders were permitted to see,
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: we have to ask, What happens when outsiders refuse to
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: accept that control? Restrictions on photography, recording, kivas, ceremonial rooms,
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: and particular forms of participation do not exist in a
• 23:41
  Speaker 1: historical vacuum. They belong to a landscape in which outsiders
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: repeatedly treated visibility as ownership and curiosity as entitlement. The
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: next question is therefore not simply what the sacred clown means,
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: but what we are actually entitled to know about him.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: because some parts of the history belong to the public record,
• 23:59
  Speaker 1: while others require us to recognize that the boundary itself
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: may be part of the religion. There is a temptation,
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: especially when a subject becomes as strange and compelling as
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: this one, to believe that going deeper always means uncovering more,
• 24:13
  Speaker 1: as though the researcher who keeps digging will eventually reach
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: the final hidden ceremony, the private prayer, the restricted object,
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: the initiation nobody was supposed to describe, and emerge with
• 24:24
  Speaker 1: the complete meaning of the tradition in hand. The history
• 24:27
  Speaker 1: we have already followed should make us suspicious of that instinct,
• 24:31
  Speaker 1: because Pueblo communities have spent generations dealing with outsiders who
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: treated curiosity as entitlement, access as ownership, and publication as
• 24:40
  Speaker 1: proof that information had somehow ceased to belong to the
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: people whose religious world produced it. The question is therefore
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: not simply how much information exists, but whether every piece
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: of information that can be found should be treated as
• 24:54
  Speaker 1: ours to assemble, explain, and reproduce, and redistribute. Cochiti Pueblo's
• 25:00
  Speaker 1: current visitor guidance cannot be much clearer about where some
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: of these boundaries remain. The Pueblo describes dances as religious
• 25:07
  Speaker 1: ceremonies rather than public performances, requiring silence during dances and ceremonies,
• 25:13
  Speaker 1: prohibiting photography and audio or video recording, and instructs visitors
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: not to question participants while ceremonies are underway, and identifies kivas,
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: ceremonial rooms, and cemeteries as sacred places restricted to Pueblo members.
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: The guidance also reminds visitors that witnessing a ceremony is
• 25:32
  Speaker 1: a privilege rather than a right, which matters enormously after
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: the history we have just followed. An outsider may be present,
• 25:39
  Speaker 1: may see movement, costume, sequence, and public behavior, and may
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: still not possess the ceremony in a meaningful sense, because
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: visibility does not erase the community's authority to determine what
• 25:51
  Speaker 1: may be recorded, explained, or carried away That principle is
• 25:56
  Speaker 1: increasingly visible inside museums as well. The National Museum of
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: the American Indian states that some objects, images, and information
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: in its holdings should not be publicly shared and that,
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: when Native or Indigenous communities identify culture sensitivities, the museum
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: can withhold images, restrict information, or remove materials from public display.
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: That is not theoretical.
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: NMAI's catalog includes ceremonial objects whose records remain publicly visible
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: while the image itself is withheld, including an A or
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: Zuni Koyemsi mudhead clown mask.
• 26:32
  Speaker 2: The museum can acknowledge that.
• 26:33
  Speaker 1: An object exists without assuming the public is therefore entitled
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: to stare at it, reproduce it, or treat institutional possession
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: as the cancellation of indigenous cultural authority. That is a
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: major shift from the assumptions under which many older museums
• 26:48
  Speaker 1: and anthropological collections were built, Ceremonial objects could be purchased, traded, photographed,
• 26:55
  Speaker 1: removed from communities, catalogued and displayed according to institutional priorities
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: while the people whose traditions produced them had little control
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: over how they were interpreted or whether certain materials should
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: have been exhibited at all. Modern restrictions do not erase
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: that history, but they establish a different principle. An archive
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: can contain something without making it universally available and knowledge
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: can retain cultural relationships and obligations even after an object
• 27:23
  Speaker 1: acquires an accession number, a legal owner, or a digital record.
• 27:28
  Speaker 1: For a show like this, that creates a boundary we
• 27:30
  Speaker 1: should respect without turning restriction into false mysticism. I do
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: not want to imply that every unavailable detail conceals some
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: imaginable supernatural secret, because secrecy itself can become another commodity
• 27:42
  Speaker 1: for outsiders, especially occultists attracted to anything described as forbidden, hidden, initiatory,
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: or ancient. Sometimes information is restricted not because it contains
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: the final key to reality, but because it belongs within
• 27:57
  Speaker 1: particular relationships, offices, responsibilities, or communities. A prayer removed from
• 28:04
  Speaker 1: a ceremony, a mask removed from its ritual setting, or
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: an initiation detailed copy from an old field notebook can
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: become less intelligible rather than more once it has been
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: separated from the structure that gave it meaning. This is
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: also why century-old ethnography has to be handled differently from
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: contemporary tribal permission. The fact that an anthropologist published something
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: in 1915, 1931, or 1940 tells us that the information
• 28:31
  Speaker 1: entered the historical record, but it does not tell us
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: that the community considered unrestricted publication appropriate, nor does it
• 28:38
  Speaker 1: obligate us to collect every scattered detail and reconstruct procedures
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: that are not publicly practiced for outsiders today. Historical sources
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: remain invaluable because they preserve stories institutional.
• 28:51
  Speaker 2: Descriptions, languages, and.
• 28:54
  Speaker 1: Observations that might otherwise have disappeared from the written record,
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: but responsible use means acknowledging the conditions under which those
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: sources were produced and refusing to confuse scholarly availability with
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: ceremonial permission. That distinction matters especially with co-share and related
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: clown societies, because the public face of the clown can
• 29:15
  Speaker 1: create the illusion that the entire institution is public. The
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: clown may perform before spectators, appear in paintings and carvings,
• 29:23
  Speaker 1: be represented in museum collections, and become recognizable through black
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: and white striping. While membership obligations, ceremonial preparation, prayers, internal meanings,
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: restricted spaces, and society-specific knowledge remain beyond what an observer
• 29:41
  Speaker 1: is entitled to claim. The visible clown is not the
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: complete clown, just as Awasai's painting is not a transparent
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: blueprint of Xhosa religion, and accepting that incompleteness is not
• 29:52
  Speaker 1: a failure of research. It is recognition that people belonging
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: to a living tradition retain the authority to decide where
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: the public record ends. In a strange way, this returns
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: us to the lesson the clown has been teaching from
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: the beginning. Boundaries become visible when someone tries to cross them.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: The federal government crossed them by attempting to decide when
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: Playboy people could dance. Missionaries crossed them by treating unfamiliar
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: ritual behavior as evidence of immorality. Collectors and institutions crossed
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: them when acquisition was mistaken and for unrestricted cultural ownership,
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: and researchers crossed them when curiosity became sufficient justification for disclosure.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: Contemporary Pueblo restrictions and museum policies make those boundaries explicit,
• 30:37
  Speaker 1: and the responsible response is not to search for the
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: loophole that lets us get around them. Once we accept
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: that we cannot and should not know everything, the genuinely
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: public material actually becomes easier to understand because we stop
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: forcing every gap to become a mystery requiring our explanation.
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: We can examine the society role of clowning, the documented
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: history of federal suppression, indigenous art, agricultural relationships, published narratives,
• 31:05
  Speaker 1: archaeological arguments, and and comparative theories of ritual inversion without
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: pretending those sources give us possession of the entire ceremonial world.
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: What remains restricted does not weaken the story. It reminds
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: us that we are dealing with living traditions whose practitioners
• 31:22
  Speaker 1: still determine what outsiders are permitted to see and say.
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: And with that boundary established, we can move into the
• 31:29
  Speaker 1: next problem without repeating the mistake of turning every indigenous
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: clown into the same figure. because the Pueblo world contains
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: other ceremonial clown complexes whose appearance, history, and function differ
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: sharply from the black and white cochere. Treating them as
• 31:44
  Speaker 1: interchangeable would erase exactly the distinctions we have spent this
• 31:47
  Speaker 1: entire episode trying to protect. If the black and white
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: cochere have become the visual center of this story, one
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: of the most important things we can do now is
• 31:56
  Speaker 1: deliberately move away from them, because Pueblo ceremonial clowning does
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: not reduce to one costume, one society, or one kind
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: of ritual personality. Among the Ae or Zuni, one of
• 32:08
  Speaker 1: the most famous related figures is the Koyemshi, often translated
• 32:12
  Speaker 1: or glossed in English as a mudhead clown, and the
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: difference in appearance alone should warn us we are dealing
• 32:18
  Speaker 1: with another ceremonial complex rather than a regional variation of.
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: The striped Kosher.
• 32:23
  Speaker 1: Instead of black and white body bands and the dramatic
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: visual contrast we have already discussed, Other ethnographic and museum
• 32:31
  Speaker 1: descriptions identify Koyamshi through distinctive cloth or mask forms associated
• 32:36
  Speaker 1: with the rounded, not mud-colored appearance that produced the English
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: nickname Mudhead. The National Museum of the American Indian catalogs
• 32:44
  Speaker 1: an A. Koyamshi mask from Zuni Puebo as a ceremonial
• 32:49
  Speaker 1: or ritual object and, significantly, withholds the image from public display,
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: so the very object that could satisfy our curiosity about
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: appearance also reinforces the boundary we established in the previous section.
• 33:01
  Speaker 1: That distinction matters because the internet has a habit of
• 33:04
  Speaker 1: collapsing Kosher, Koyemchi, Hopi mudheads, and eventually Lakota Hayoka into
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: one giant category called Sacred Clown, as though each were
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: the same ancient archetype wearing a different regional costume. The
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: historical record does not support that shortcut. Matilda Koch-Stevenson's early
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: 20th century study of Zuni religion places the Koyamshi inside
• 33:27
  Speaker 1: a much larger aceremonial world involving esoteric fraternities, priests, medicine societies,
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: katsina traditions, and other ritual offices, while later comparative work
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: by Elsie Clues Parsons examined Hopi and Zuni ceremonialism precisely
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: because parallels and differences both mattered. Similarity is worth studying,
• 33:48
  Speaker 1: but the Koyamshi should not be reduced to the Zuni
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: kosher any more than the kosher should be reduced to
• 33:54
  Speaker 1: a generic Native American jester. Museum records show how complicated
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: even the English category Mudhead can become. NMAI holds objects
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: labeled Koyemsi or Mudhead Clown from both A and Hopi contexts,
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: including Zuni ceremonial material and Hopi katsina carvings by named artists,
• 34:14
  Speaker 1: while Smithsonian archival collections preserve Hopi drawings in which Koyemsi
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: appeared alongside other katsina. That does not make the Zuni
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: and Hopi figures identical. tells us that related names, visual forms,
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: and anthropological categories have circulated across more than one Pueblo
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: ceremonial world, and that museum language itself can preserve a
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: history of comparison that should not be mistaken for proof
• 34:39
  Speaker 1: of one uniform institution. What makes the Koyamshi especially useful
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: for our larger argument is that Pueblo clowning does not
• 34:46
  Speaker 1: always announce itself through the same visual technology. The striped
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: kosher transforms the body through paint, alternating contrasts, hair, and
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: exaggerated pattern, while the mudhead complex produces a very different
• 34:59
  Speaker 1: grotesque presence in which the head or face has become enlarged, knotted, earthen, distorted,
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: or otherwise unlike an ordinary human face. Both make the
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: performer visually difficult to classify, but they do so differently,
• 35:14
  Speaker 1: even without attempting to decode restricted symbolism. The public material
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: is enough to show that ceremonial clowning can destabilize ordinary
• 35:22
  Speaker 1: personhood before the performance says or does anything at all.
• 35:26
  Speaker 1: Older museum and ethnographic descriptions sometimes went much further by
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: assigning fixed mythological identities to the Koyemchi, and this is
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: exactly where caution matters. A Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: History catalog card attached to a Zuni Koyemchi mask collected
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: in 1896 preserves an old description calling the figure the
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: Great Father of the Ancestral Gods. but that wording belongs
• 35:50
  Speaker 1: to a 19th century collecting and classification context and should
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: not be repeated as though it were a contemporary atheological statement.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: The note is historically useful because it tells us how
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: collectors and ethnographers represented the figure, but the distance between
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: an old museum card and a living community's present religious
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: language is enormous. Modern NMAI cataloging does something much more restrained.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: It identifies cultural origin, recognizes ceremonial status, and in some
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: cases withholds imagery without pretending the catalog page can explain
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: the entire religious office. The word clown can mislead us
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: in another direction as well, because a modern audience hears
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: mudhead clown and imagines a comic subtype, almost like another
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: character class in the same performance. The historical literature instead
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: places Koyamshi within deeply organized ceremonial systems where comedy, ritual service,
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: sacred impersonation, and social function can overlap. Parsons' comparative work
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: situates Koyamshi inside larger ceremonial worlds that include katsina organizations,
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: rain priests, medicine societies, clan relationships, and weather-related ritual, which
• 37:02
  Speaker 1: does not mean that Koyamshi personally performed every one of
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: those functions. It means the Kion complex belongs inside a
• 37:08
  Speaker 1: ceremonial universe rather than detachable karmic relief. That gives us
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: the methodological lesson we need before moving forward. Every time
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: two traditions share behavior or visual resemblance, we have to
• 37:21
  Speaker 1: ask whether we are looking at historical relationship, convergent ritual strategy, borrowing,
• 37:26
  Speaker 1: anthropological over-classification, or simply our own tendency to notice similarities
• 37:31
  Speaker 1: faster than differences. Pueblo communities have interacted for centuries through migration, trade, intermarriage, pilgrimage, warfare,
• 37:41
  Speaker 1: ceremonial exchange, and political alliance, so parallels should not surprise
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: us but neither should local distinctivenesses. Comparing Kosher, Kosa, Koyamshi,
• 37:51
  Speaker 1: Hopi Mudheads, and other clown organizations can reveal a regional
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: conversation about inversion, authority, sacred performance, and social correction, only
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: if the traditions involved are allowed to remain distinct. That
• 38:05
  Speaker 1: becomes even more important before we leave the Playboy world entirely,
• 38:09
  Speaker 1: because the next comparison appears almost automatically whenever somebody searches
• 38:13
  Speaker 1: for a Native American sacred clown. Sooner or later, the
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: kosher gets placed beside the Lakota Heyoka, and once again
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: the shared themes of reversal, contrary behavior, sacred authority, and
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: apparent foolishness make the comparison tempting. The comparison is not useless,
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: because if we confuse analogy with identity, we will rebuild
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: the exact pan-indigenous mythology this episode has spent all this
• 38:39
  Speaker 1: time trying to dismantle. The comparison between Pueblo ceremonial clowns
• 38:44
  Speaker 1: and the Lakota Heyoka is tempting because the first thing
• 38:47
  Speaker 1: an outsider notices is the shared language of reversal. Both
• 38:51
  Speaker 1: traditions have been described through contrary behavior, ridicule, paradox, apparent foolishness,
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: and deliberate violation of ordinary expectations. And if we stop
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: at that level, the resemblance can look strong enough that
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: Internet summaries begin treating Sacred Clown as one universal Native
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: American office. That is exactly where comparison becomes dangerous. Because
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: the Heioka belongs to a Lakota religious world with its
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: own cosmology, visionary structure, ceremonial obligations, and relationship to the
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: Thunder Beings, while the Kosher belong to the Pueblo ceremonial
• 39:25
  Speaker 1: institutions whose histories, languages, social organization, and religious responsibilities are
• 39:31
  Speaker 1: entirely different. Similar ritual strategies do not make the traditions interchangeable.
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: One of the clearest descriptions comes from Black Elk, whose
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: account in Black Elk Speaks explains that those who act
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: as Heyoka do so through a sacred relationship with the
• 39:47
  Speaker 1: Thunder Beings of the West. and that their apparently foolish
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: or reversed actions carry power precisely because they emerge from
• 39:54
  Speaker 1: that visionary experience. The National Park Service gives a similar
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: explanation in its biography of John Fire Lame Deer, identifying
• 40:02
  Speaker 1: him as a Heioka and connecting the role with dreams
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: or visitations involving Thunder Beings. That theological foundation matters immediately
• 40:11
  Speaker 1: because it cannot simply be imported into playable clowning. A
• 40:14
  Speaker 1: Kosher does not become a Kosher because every sacred clown
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: supposedly receives a thunder vision, and a Heyoka is not
• 40:21
  Speaker 1: merely a plains version of the Kosher wearing different clothes.
• 40:24
  Speaker 1: The source of authority, cosmological relationships, and institutional setting are
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: different even when an outsider looking only at behavior notices
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: inversion in both. The source of authority, cosmological relationships, and
• 40:37
  Speaker 1: institutional setting are different even when an outsider looking only
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: at behavior notices inversion in both. The contrary behavior itself
• 40:46
  Speaker 1: can be dramatic enough to encourage confusion. Historical descriptions of
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: Heioka traditions include backward speech, doing things in reverse, acting
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: cold when the weather is hot, or treating heat as
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: though it were cold. And in some older accounts, handling
• 41:00
  Speaker 1: boiling food or water in performances understood in relation to
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: sacred power and thunder visions. Black Elk's description makes the
• 41:08
  Speaker 1: deeper logic clear by emphasizing that behavior which looks ridiculous
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: from the outside can still be sacred. And this is
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: precisely why scholars of religion have been so interested in
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: the Heioka as an example of ritual reversal. Yet the
• 41:21
  Speaker 1: fact that Pueblo clown societies can also employ backward speech,
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: contrary statements, ridicule, or deliberate inversion does not prove common
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: origin or common theology. Reversal is a ritual technique, not
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: a DNA test. Fasting, Masking, pilgrimage, drumming, ecstatic movement, silence, ordeal,
• 41:41
  Speaker 1: and countless other religious practices appear in unrelated traditions without
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: proving that one descended from another. And the same caution
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: has to apply here. The English word clown distorts both
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: traditions in another way because it encourages us to imagine
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: entertainment as the primary purpose. Black Elk presents the Heioka
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: as someone possessing sacred power whose actions may look funny,
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: where the playboy material we have already examined places clown
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: societies within ceremonial structures involving agriculture, discipline, katsina traditions, social criticism,
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: and ritual order. Humor can coexist with seriousness in both cases,
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: but the seriousness comes from different religious systems. The comparison
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: works best when we ask what ritual inversion can accomplish
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: rather than whether the figures are secretly the same character.
• 42:31
  Speaker 1: Once we frame the question that way, the parallel becomes
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: much more interesting. Both traditions demonstrate that behaving incorrectly can
• 42:38
  Speaker 1: sometimes become a religious responsibility, and both challenge the assumption
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: that sacred authority must always look controlled, dignified, solemn, or predictable.
• 42:49
  Speaker 1: A contrary figure can make ordinary categories visible by reversing them,
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: because people often stop noticing a rule until someone deliberately
• 42:56
  Speaker 1: violates it. Walking forward feels natural until someone insists on
• 43:00
  Speaker 1: moving backward. Ordinary speech becomes noticeable when statements are reversed
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: and social dignity becomes visible when a sanctioned figure temporarily
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: makes dignity impossible. That shared mechanism is enough to justify
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: comparison without inventing common origin. Comparative religion is most useful
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: when it preserves differences while identifying recurring human strategies. Because
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: the point is not to discover one hidden universal religion
• 43:27
  Speaker 1: beneath every culture but to ask why different societies sometimes
• 43:31
  Speaker 1: solve similar problems with similar ritual tools. Human communities everywhere
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: deal with hierarchy, hypocrisy, fear, desire, uncertainty, death, authority, embarrassment,
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: and the inability of formal language to express every truth
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: that needs to be said. So it is not surprising
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: that more than one tradition discovered the usefulness of a
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: figure who can operate at the edge of normal behavior.
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: What matters is where that authority comes from. who is
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: permitted to occupy the role, what cosmological or institutional relationships
• 44:04
  Speaker 1: make the behavior legitimate, and what obligations accompany the apparent disorder.
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: Those details are precisely what disappear when a culturally specific
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: office is reduced to a psychological archetype. That is also
• 44:17
  Speaker 1: why we should resist turning the Heioka into a generic
• 44:20
  Speaker 1: occult symbol of the trickster any more than we should
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: do that with the Koshera. Modern spiritual writing frequently detaches
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: culturally specific religious figures from their communities and converts them
• 44:32
  Speaker 1: into archetypes supposedly available to everyone, but doing so strips
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: away the relationships and obligations that make the roles sacred.
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: The Heoka is not simply anyone who enjoys contradiction, shocks people,
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: behaves unpredictably, or calls themselves a sacred clown. And the
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: Kosher is not simply anyone who uses satire to teach
• 44:52
  Speaker 1: a lesson. These are community-bound religious identities embedded within traditions
• 44:57
  Speaker 1: far larger than the behaviors outsiders find most visually or
• 45:01
  Speaker 1: psychologically interesting. So when we place the kosher beside the Heyoka,
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: the responsible conclusion is neither that they are unrelated in
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: every comparative sense, nor that they are two names for
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: one ancient office. The useful conclusion is that both reveal
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: a larger religious possibility. Sacred authority can sometimes be expressed
• 45:21
  Speaker 1: through reversal rather than conformity. and a person who appears
• 45:24
  Speaker 1: to violate ordinary expectations may be carrying obligations that ordinary
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: observers cannot see. The resemblance tells us something about ritual
• 45:33
  Speaker 1: inversion as a human strategy, while the difference reminds us
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: that no ritual strategy exists outside history, language, community, and cosmology.
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: And with that distinction finally secured, we can return to
• 45:46
  Speaker 1: the Pueblo world and ask the historical question that has
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: been sitting underneath the entire investigation from the beginning. How
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: old are these clown institutions and is there evidence that
• 45:55
  Speaker 1: organized ritual clowning existed in the greater southwest long before
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: Europeans arrived? Once we have separated Pueblo clown traditions from
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: the Heioka and from one another, the next question becomes unavoidable,
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: because most of what we have discussed so far survives
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: through 19th and 20th century ethnography, oral history, museum collections,
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: and living ceremonial practices. while the institutions themselves almost certainly
• 46:21
  Speaker 1: reach much deeper into the past. Archaeology, however, does not
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: preserve social roles cleanly. It gives us buildings, pottery, pigments, figurines, burials, tools, roads,
• 46:34
  Speaker 1: food remains, and other material traces, but it rarely leaves
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: behind a label telling us that a particular image belonged
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: to a clown society or that a particular room was
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: used by people whose descendants later held a named ceremonial office.
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: The farther back we go, the more carefully we have
• 46:51
  Speaker 1: to distinguish evidence for ritual clowning from evidence for figures
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: that merely resemble later ceremonial clowns, and both of those
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: from evidence from direct institutional continuity. The most important recent
• 47:03
  Speaker 1: argument comes from archaeologist Michael Matthewitz, whose 2025 article in KIVA,
• 47:09
  Speaker 1: The Keepers of Tradition, Clown Societies in the Casas Grandes
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: and Plebeian Worlds Bring Archaeological, Ethnohistorical, and ethnological evidence together
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: to argue that clown societies were present in the Casa
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: Grande's cultural world centered on Pacuaym in what is now Chihuahua, Mexico,
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: during the Medio period.
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: Roughly A.D. 1200 to 1450.
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: Matthew Witts goes further and proposes that these institutions may
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: have influenced the development of later playable clown societies farther north,
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: while also arguing that clown figures may have functioned as
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: avatars of a supernatural figure he identifies as as Sun
• 47:46
  Speaker 1: Youth and may have been involved in Casa Grande's governance.
• 47:50
  Speaker 1: That is an enormous claim for this subject because it
• 47:53
  Speaker 1: potentially pushes organized ritual clowning in the greater southwest and
• 47:57
  Speaker 1: northwestern Mexico centuries deeper than the detailed ethnographic record.
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: But the wording matters.
• 48:04
  Speaker 1: The argument is that these institutions may have influenced later
• 48:07
  Speaker 1: Pueblo clown traditions, not that archaeologists have uncovered a medieval
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: co-share lodge with a membership role and recognizable modern initiation sequence.
• 48:16
  Speaker 1: But Coimbe is exactly the kind of place where such
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: an argument becomes historically plausible because it was not an
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: isolated village setting at the edge of the southwest. Archaeological
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: synthesis describes the settlement as, as one of the largest
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: and most socially complex communities in the greater Southwest, with
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: multi-story adobe room blocks, ceremonial mounds, ball courts, water control systems, reservoirs, plazas,
• 48:42
  Speaker 1: macaw pens, distinctive T-shaped doorways, and far-reaching exchange networks. Tropical
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: macaws were bred there, shell and other materials circulated through
• 48:52
  Speaker 1: long-distance trade, and the site occupied a region in which
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: Puebloan and Mesoamerican influences intersected That matters because pre-contact North
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: America was not a collection of sealed cultural islands waiting
• 49:05
  Speaker 1: for Europeans to connect them. People moved, traded, migrated, intermarried, fought,
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: made pilgrimages, exchanged ceremonial ideas, and carried materials across enormous distances.
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: If clown institutions or clown imagery moved, between Casas Grandes
• 49:21
  Speaker 1: and Pueblo communities, then we would not need to imagine
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: an impossible leap between unrelated worlds. We would be looking
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: at a region already connected through sustained interaction. The difficult
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: part is proving exactly what moved when it moved, and
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: whether a visual or institutional resemblance reflects continuity, borrowing, convergence,
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: or an archaeological category imposed backward from later ethnography. Matthew
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: Witt's argument is strongest when treated as a historical model
• 49:51
  Speaker 1: built from several lines of evidence rather than one dramatic discovery.
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: He compares archaeological imagery from Casas Grandes with later Pueblo
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: clown traditions. places those parallels besides ethnographically documented social roles
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: of clown societies, and connects them with his earlier work
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: on the Casas Grande supernatural figure he calls Sun Youth.
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: In a 2018 KIVA article devoted to that figure, Mathewitz
• 50:18
  Speaker 1: described Pequim as an unusually complex and hierarchical Pueblo whose
• 50:22
  Speaker 1: material culture combined Pueblan and Mesoamerican elements, and his later
• 50:26
  Speaker 1: clown study extends that reconstruction by suggesting that that clown
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: figures connected with Sun Youth may have participated in governance
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: as well as ritual. If that reconstruction is correct, the
• 50:38
  Speaker 1: relationship between clowning and authority that we encountered in later
• 50:41
  Speaker 1: Playboy ethnography may have deep regional precedence. That possibility makes
• 50:47
  Speaker 1: the title The Keepers of Tradition especially interesting, because the
• 50:51
  Speaker 1: clown in this model is not the enemy of continuity,
• 50:54
  Speaker 1: but one of its custodians. That sounds paradoxical only if
• 50:58
  Speaker 1: we assume tradition means solemn repetition and unchanging conformity, whereas
• 51:03
  Speaker 1: everything we have seen in these episodes suggests that ritualized
• 51:06
  Speaker 1: disorder can itself become a traditional responsibility. A clown society
• 51:11
  Speaker 1: capable of criticism, inversion, discipline, ceremonial participation, and governance could
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: help preserve institutions precisely because it gives those institutions a
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: structured way to expose failure and correct themselves. At the
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: same time, this is exactly where we have to resist
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: the most seductive version of the story. Archaeologists do not
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: possess a continuous documentary chain connecting a Casas Grandes figure
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: in A.D. 1250 to a named Kosher society at Cochiti
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: centuries later. And the Playboy traditions documented historically have passed
• 51:45
  Speaker 1: through migration, exchange, Spanish colonialization, missionization, demographic upheaval, interplayable borrowing,
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: and internal development across many generations. Even the chronology of
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: the Paquim have been revised since the major joint Casas
• 52:00
  Speaker 1: Grandes project excavations, with current scholarship generally placing this site
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: around AD 1200 to 1450 rather than earlier dates once
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: proposed by Charles D.
• 52:11
  Speaker 2: Pesso.
• 52:12
  Speaker 1: Echinographic interpretation brings another layer of uncertainty because authenticity, provenience, comparison,
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: and the danger of reading modern categories backward into prehistoric
• 52:22
  Speaker 1: images all have to be considered. The responsible conclusion is
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: already enough without turning probability into certainty. By the 13th
• 52:31
  Speaker 1: through 15th centuries, a major ritual and political center in
• 52:35
  Speaker 1: northern Chihuahua existed within dense networks linking northwestern Mexico and
• 52:40
  Speaker 1: the American Southwest. A recent peer-reviewed scholarship argues that organized
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: clown societies formed part of the Casas Grandes world and
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: may have contributed to the later development of playable clown institutions.
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: That does not prove that the cochere documented at Cochiti
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: in the 20th century existed unchanged 700 years earlier. But
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: it does challenge any easy assumption that ceremonial clowning was
• 53:03
  Speaker 1: a late invention, a response to Europeans, or a superficial
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: comic lair added onto an older religious system. The possibility
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: now has to be taken seriously that ritual clowning, social inversion,
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: and clown authority belong to a pre-contact history extending centuries
• 53:19
  Speaker 1: before Spanish colonization. And once we allow that possibility, the
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: entire episode changes scale. The black and white figure we
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: first noticed because he reminded us of Beetlejuice may stand
• 53:30
  Speaker 1: at that modern edge of an institutional history reaching through
• 53:34
  Speaker 1: Playboy Ceremonial Society's pre-contact exchange networks Casas Grande's political organization
• 53:41
  Speaker 1: in a southwestern religious landscape in which the clown may
• 53:44
  Speaker 1: have been involved not merely in jokes, but in the
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: management of authority itself. That takes us directly into the
• 53:51
  Speaker 1: last major question before Beetlejuice returns, because if the clown
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: can be ancient, sacred, politically embedded, socially corrective, and deliberately
• 54:00
  Speaker 1: ridiculous all at once, then we have to ask why
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: human societies repeatedly discover that the person authorized to act
• 54:06
  Speaker 1: like a fool can become one of the most useful
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: people in the room. By this point, one pattern has
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: become impossible to ignore. The Sacred Clown repeatedly appears where
• 54:16
  Speaker 1: ordinary categories begin to fail. He can be comic and
• 54:19
  Speaker 1: religious at the same time, socially disruptive while institutionally authorized,
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: obscene without existing outside the sacred, ridiculous while carrying responsibilities
• 54:29
  Speaker 1: the rest of the community takes seriously and capable of
• 54:32
  Speaker 1: making disorder visible without simply becoming disorder himself. That cluster
• 54:37
  Speaker 1: of contradictions is why anthropologists have repeatedly turned to ideas
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: such as symbolic inversion, liminality, reflexivity, and anti-structure when trying
• 54:47
  Speaker 1: to describe what ceremonial clowning can accomplish. The clown does
• 54:51
  Speaker 1: not merely break rules at random. He crosses them in
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: a way that makes everybody else notice that the rules
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: were there. Barbara Babak's work is especially useful here because
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: she spent years examining symbolic inversion, self-reference, and Pueblo ritual clowning,
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: while her broader project, In the Reversible World, asked what
• 55:09
  Speaker 1: happens when societies deliberately turn ordinary classifications upside down. Symbolic
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: inversion is not simply doing the opposite for novelty's sake.
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: It creates a temporary world in which familiar relationships are reversed, exaggerated,
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: and or destabilized enough that people are forced to notice
• 55:27
  Speaker 1: assumptions they normally move through without thinking about them. A
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: fool can become wise, a low-status figure can ridicule someone powerful,
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: proper speech can become backward speech, restraint can become gluttony,
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: somity can become obscenity, and the person who appears marginal
• 55:44
  Speaker 1: can suddenly occupy their center of attention. The ordinary world
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: becomes visible because, for a moment, it has rearranged. Vic
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: Turner approached the related problem from a very different ethnographic
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: setting in the ritual process, developing the language of liminality, communitas, structure,
• 56:02
  Speaker 1: and anti-structure while studying Endembu ritual in Zambia, and then
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: extending those ideas comparatively. Turner was not writing a theory
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: of kosher, and we should not retrofit Pueblo ceremonial life
• 56:14
  Speaker 1: into an African ethnography as though one comparative framework explains
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: every ritual system on earth.
• 56:21
  Speaker 2: His discussion is useful.
• 56:22
  Speaker 1: Because he recognizes that ritual can create temporary conditions in
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: which rank, identity, and hierarchy becomes unstable without society simply disintegrating.
• 56:32
  Speaker 1: His treatment of status reversal is especially relevant here. People
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: may temporarily act in ways opposite to their standardized roles,
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: yet the reversal occurs inside a larger ritual structure that
• 56:43
  Speaker 1: contains it, and eventually returns participants to ordinary social life.
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: That distinction helps explain why calling the sacred clown chaos
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: works only up to a point. Actual chaos has no
• 56:56
  Speaker 1: membership rules, no chiefs, no ceremonial obligations, no recognizing timing,
• 57:01
  Speaker 1: no moment at which the performance is expected to stop,
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: and no responsibility to help protect the dance after mocking
• 57:08
  Speaker 1: the people around it. What we have been following, instead,
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: is a structured relationship with disorder. The clown can violate dignity, appetite, speech, hierarchy,
• 57:17
  Speaker 1: and propriety, because the violation itself has been given a place,
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: and that place prevents transgression from becoming indistinguishable from simple breakdown.
• 57:25
  Speaker 1: This is where reflexivity becomes especially useful, because the clown
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: does not merely entertain society, he can make society look
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: at itself. Roxanne Swinsell's explanation of the clown reflecting greed
• 57:37
  Speaker 1: back toward the greedy person gives us an indigenous description
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: of that mechanism without requiring theoretical jargon. Behavior normally buried
• 57:45
  Speaker 1: inside everyday life is exaggerated, embodied, and placed before the
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: community until it becomes simultaneously recognizable and absurd. Babcock's interest
• 57:55
  Speaker 1: in mirrors, masks, self-reference, and inversion can help us describe
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: that process. But the direction matters. We begin with Pueblo
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: voices and practices, then use anthropology to name patterns already
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: visible in the material, rather than allowing anthropology to tell
• 58:11
  Speaker 1: Pueblo people what their religion supposedly really means. There is
• 58:15
  Speaker 1: also a political edge to sanctioned foolishness because the person
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: permitted to make authority ridiculous possesses a dangerous kind of freedom,
• 58:23
  Speaker 1: even when that freedom is bounded. Court jesters, carnival traditions,
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: holy fools, reversal festivals, and other societies licensed comic figures
• 58:32
  Speaker 1: offer comparative examples of hierarchy being mocked or temporarily inverted,
• 58:37
  Speaker 1: but none of those comparisons prove the existence of one
• 58:40
  Speaker 1: universal clown religion. What they suggest is a recurring social problem.
• 58:45
  Speaker 1: Communities need continuity, but systems that cannot tolerate criticism become brittle.
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: One way of protecting a structure may be to create
• 58:53
  Speaker 1: a limited place where the structure is allowed to expose
• 58:56
  Speaker 1: its own vanity, hypocrisy, greed, or pretension without requiring the
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: entire social order to collapse. That may be the deepest
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: meaning behind giving chaos a uniform. Once disorder has a
• 59:09
  Speaker 1: recognized form, the community can bring it close without surrendering
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: to it. Obscenity can expose propriety, foolishness can expose pretension,
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: gluttony can expose greed, mockery can expose authority, and reversal
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: can expose rules that normally remain invisible precisely because everybody
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: follows them. The sacred clown is therefore not useful because
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: he destroys structure or represents a world without rules. He
• 59:34
  Speaker 1: becomes useful because he can cross the boundary, make the
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: boundary visible, and return. And that brings us almost all
• 59:41
  Speaker 1: the way back to Beetlejuice, because the final difference between
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: the two figures become clearer than the resemblance ever was.
• 59:48
  Speaker 1: Beetlejuice represents chaos that answers primarily to itself. The ceremonial
• 59:53
  Speaker 1: clown in the context we have examined can represent something stranger.
• 59:56
  Speaker 1: a community deciding that even disorder must answer to obligations, timing, limits,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 1: and a job.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 2: The visual resemblance is still strange, and.
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 1: The behavioral overlap is still worth noticing, but after everything
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: we have examined, the real question is no longer why
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 1: a Hollywood character and a Pueblo ceremonial clown can look
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 1: weirdly similar. The deeper question is why both figures become
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 1: recognizable through the same broad language of disruption, exaggerated appetite,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: grotesque humor, sexually impropriety, mockery, category violation, and the ability
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: to enter a structured environment and suddenly make everybody aware
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: that the rules governing that environment are not laws of
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: nature but expectations people have agreed to follow. That is
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: exactly why Beetlejuice works as a character. He is dangerous
• 1:00:40
  Speaker 1: because the rules containing everyone else rarely seem to contain
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: him for long. And he is funny for almost the
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: same reason, because he can enter a situation everyone else
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: treats seriously and expose how fragile that seriousness becomes when
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: one person refuses to cooperate with it. He treats death
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: like bureaucracy, marriage like a loophole, propriety like a joke,
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: and personal boundaries like invitations, which makes him compelling precisely
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 1: because he is a walking violation of categories that are
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: supposed to remain stable. The living and the dead, horror
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: and comedy, sexuality and grotesquerie, charm and disgust, Power and
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: stupidity all collapse into the same figure, leaving the audience
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: unsure whether to laugh at him, fear him, or do
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 1: both at once. The co-share and related playable ceremonial clowns
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: can also occupy unstable categories, but the comparison breaks at
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: the point where function enters a picture. The ceremonial clown
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: can mock authority without standing outside the ceremonial system. Exaggerate
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 1: greed without simply being greedy, behave obscenely without making obscenity
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: the permanent moral order, and cross social boundaries while remaining
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: embedded within recognized memberships, responsibilities, obligations, timing, and community authority.
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: The clown can look like a disorder while belonging to
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: an institution, and that may be the most important difference
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 1: between ritual inversion and ordinary chaos. That difference is also
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: why this comparison should never become a simple claim that
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: Beetlejuice and Kosher are the same thing, but the same
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: caution has to work in the other direction as well.
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: We cannot honestly say that Beetlejuice was definitely modeled on
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: the Kosher without evidence from Tim Burton or someone directly
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 1: involved in the original production, but we also cannot honestly
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: declare that the resemblance is meaningless or purely accidental when
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 1: nobody has demonstrated that either. What we actually have is
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: an unanswered question, and when all the similarities are placed
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: beside one another, that question becomes a hell of a
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: lot more interesting than simply saying, well, lots of things
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: have stripes. Because it is not only the stripes. The
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: cochere is one of the most visually recognizable forms of
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: playable ceremonial clowning precisely because of that extreme black and
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 1: white appearance. Traditionally produced through broad contrasting stripes across the body,
• 1:02:53
  Speaker 1: along with dramatic facial paint and an intentionally strange exaggerated appearance.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: Beetlejuice arrives with that same overwhelming black and white visual
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: language transformed into a western suit. accompanied by the pale face,
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: darkened eyes, disordered hair, grotesque expressions, theatrical movement, and the
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: unmistakable presentation of someone who looks like a clown but
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: feels slightly dangerous. The patterns are not identical, the clothing
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: is obviously not identical, and Pueblo traditions themselves differ considerably
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: from community to community, but visually there is enough here
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 1: that dismissing the resemblance requires almost as much confidence as
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: claiming direct borrowing. Then there is the behavior, because this
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 1: is where the comparison gets much harder to ignore. The
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: co-share do not merely look strange. The figure behaves incorrectly
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 1: on purpose. Playboy ceremonial clowning can involve exaggeration, ridicule, excessive appetite,
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 1: inappropriate behavior, social inversion, embarrassment, mockery, and forms of humor
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: that deliberately cross boundaries other participants would normally observe. The
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: clown becomes funny because he does what everyone else is
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: not supposed to do. and the audience understands the rules
• 1:04:04
  Speaker 1: partly because they are watching someone violate them so spectacularly.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 2: Now look at Beetlejuice.
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: He is vulgar, sexually inappropriate, greedy, obnoxious, intrusive, dishonest, theatrical, excessive, mocking,
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: and almost constitutionally incapable of behaving according to the rules
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: of whatever situation he enters. He invades solemn moments and
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: turns them ridiculous, takes ordinary social expectation and flips them
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: upside down, mocks authority, humiliates people, transforms respectable spaces into
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 1: absurd performances, and uses laughter and discomfort at exactly the
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: moments when everyone else is trying to maintain control. Even
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: his body refuses normal boundaries, because it stretches, transforms, breaks apart,
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: changes costume, produces grotesque objects, and becomes part of the
• 1:04:52
  Speaker 1: joke itself. That does not make Beetlejuice a co-share, but
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: at the same point, we have to admit that we
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 1: are looking at more than two characters who happen to
• 1:05:00
  Speaker 1: shop at the same black and white clothing store. There
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: is also a historical reason not to dismiss possible influence
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: simply because nobody involved in the film has publicly acknowledged it.
• 1:05:11
  Speaker 1: The striped Beetlejuice design existed in Tim Burton's own concept artwork,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: meaning the question ultimately reaches back into Burton's visual imagination,
• 1:05:20
  Speaker 1: and black and white Playbill clown imagery had already circulated
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 1: outside the Playbills through 20th century paintings, photographs, anthropological publications,
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: museum collections, southwestern art and representations of Native American ceremonial
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 1: life long before Burton drew Beetlejuice. That does not prove
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 1: Burton saw a co-share and copied it, but it absolutely
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: establishes that such imagery existed within the larger American visual
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 1: environment from which an artist could consciously or unconsciously borrow.
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: And that gives us several possibilities instead of forcing us
• 1:05:54
  Speaker 1: into one answer. Maybe Burton encountered an image of a
• 1:05:58
  Speaker 1: Kosher somewhere and deliberately transformed pieces of it into his
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: own supernatural clown figure. Maybe he saw the imagery years earlier,
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: forgot where it came from, and elements of it survived
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: in his visual memory until they resurfaced in a completely
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 1: different context. Maybe somebody else involved in the long development
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 1: of the character introduced an idea that eventually worked its
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: way into Burton's drawing. Maybe both Beetlejuice and the Kosher
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: independently arrived at similar visual and behavioral solutions because black
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: and white, inversion, grotesque humor, exaggerated appetite, obscenity, and rule-breaking
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 1: are extraordinarily effective ways of making the clown or trickster
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 1: as somebody standing outside ordinary social behavior. Or maybe the
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: resemblance really is accidental. At this point, we cannot prove
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: which one happened. But we can prove it, and there
• 1:06:46
  Speaker 1: is nothing there or not the same statement. In fact,
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 1: the similarities become more interesting when we acknowledge the enormous
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: difference between the two figures. Because if Betelgeuse did borrow
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 1: anything from this tradition, intentionally or otherwise, what Western popular
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: culture retained may have been the appearance and behavior of
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 1: the chaos figure while leaving behind the ceremonial structure that
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: originally gave similar behavior a completely different purpose. That is
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: where Cocher adds something to this story that Betelgeuse cannot.
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: Within Pueblo ceremonial traditions, clowning can be tamed inside a
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 1: religious and communal structure, where outrageous behavior has boundaries, obligations, timing,
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: and purpose. The clown can ridicule, exaggerate, embarrass, invert, eat excessively,
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: behave obscenely, and make people uncomfortable, yet the surrounding ceremonial
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 1: world still determines when that disorder appears, where it appears,
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: what responsibilities accompany it, and when ordinary order returns. The
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: behavior may look anarchic from the outside, but the position
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: itself is not necessarily anarchic at all. Beetlejuice looks almost
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 1: like the nightmare version of what happens when that structure disappears.
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 1: He has the clown's freedom without the clown's communal responsibility,
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 1: the obscenity without the ceremonial containment, the inversion without the
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: obligation to restore anything afterward, and the ability to expose
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 1: hypocrisy and absurdity without any requirement that the revelation serve
• 1:08:11
  Speaker 1: the people standing around him. He does not simply enter chaos.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: He wants chaos to keep going. And that is why
• 1:08:18
  Speaker 1: give chaos a job still gets to the heart of
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: the episode. Only now the phrase means something different than
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 1: it did when we started. The co-share shows that disruptive
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: behavior can be given a position inside a larger system,
• 1:08:30
  Speaker 1: while beta juice behaves like disruptive energy that has escaped
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: the system completely. One turns disorder into something that can
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: potentially teach, correct, embarrass, or reveal. The other turns disorder
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 1: loose and asks everybody else to survive it. Maybe that
• 1:08:46
  Speaker 1: resemblance is archetypal, maybe it is cultural convergence. Maybe Burton
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: saw Playboy clown imagery somewhere and consciously or unconsciously carried
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 1: it into one part of the most recognizable supernatural characters
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 1: in American film. We do not know, and unless a
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: sketchbook note, interview, production document, or some forgotten statement from
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: the people involved eventually surfaces, we may never know. But
• 1:09:10
  Speaker 1: after looking at the black and white stripes, the exaggerated appearance,
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: the clown identity, the obscenity, the appetite, the sexual impropriety,
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: the mockery, the inversion of normal behavior, the breaking of
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: social boundaries, and the strange mixture of laughter and danger
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: surrounding both figures, I do not think the responsible conclusion
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: is that there is nothing to see here. I think
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 1: the responsible conclusion is that there is enough to keep
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 1: asking the question. Maybe we originally saw Beetlejuice because Beetlejuice
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 1: is the chaos figure our own popular culture taught us
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 1: to recognize. And maybe, somewhere much further back in the
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: visual history that eventually produced him, there is a line
• 1:09:48
  Speaker 1: leading toward the black and white ceremonial clown of the
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 1: American Southwest. We cannot draw that line in permanent ink yet,
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: but we should not erase it simply because we cannot
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: prove exactly where it begins. The stripes got us here,
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 1: but they were never the only thing connecting these figures.
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: The deeper resemblance is the figure who walks into an
• 1:10:06
  Speaker 1: ordered world, violates the expectations everyone else is following, makes
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: people laugh while making them uncomfortable, and exposes the rules
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 1: precisely by breaking them in front of everyone. In one world,
• 1:10:18
  Speaker 1: that figure has been given a place, purpose, obligations, and boundaries.
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: In the other, somebody drew him in a striped suit,
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: gave him a filthy mouth, dropped him into the land
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: of the dead, and called him Beetlejuice. Whether those two
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: histories ever actually touched is still an open question.
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 2: But now, at least, it is the right fucking question.
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: And that's the end of another Occult Rejects. Hope you
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: all enjoyed, and until the next one.