Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Orthography, Spelling, Pronunciation, Translation -- Transcription Conventions -- Prologue: Ethnographic Sorrow -- Chapter 1 In the Grip of a Trickster: Mythic (W)Holes and Ethnographic Entanglements -- Chapter 2 Narrative Tricks: The Poetics of “Truthiness” and Ambivalent Analogies -- Chapter 3 Dialogic Riddling: Cosmological Musings and the Kinship of Power -- Chapter 4 Hide-and-Seek: The Social Ideologies of Deception and Revelation -- Chapter 5 A Trickster’s Tropes: Magic on the Margins of Political Power and Christianity -- Chapter 6 Dirty and Dangerous Tricks: Taking Dialogic Risks -- Chapter 7 Portending Death: Life-Affirming Laughter and the Telltale Sign of the Trickster -- Epilogue: Ethnographic Exit -- Notes -- References -- Index -- About the Author

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“We joked often—laughed to the point of crying (that deep visceral laughter)—not just about the subversive antics of Letao, but to all the allusions to how he, my friend, and I, were tricksters in our own right, moving between our cultural worlds, illuminating ambiguities and celebrating them.”This rich, experimental ethnography plays within the margins of mythology and ethnographic practice to pursue a decolonizing method of inquiry and intercultural engagement. Through a range of mischievous narratives about the mythological trickster Letao, a riM̧ajeļ (Indigenous Marshall Islander) storyteller takes the author on a journey into a deep cosmological and epistemological past and back into the colonial and imperial present. Transcribed in this book, the simultaneously effortless and pointedly deliberate conversations between author Phillip H. McArthur and respected riM̧ajeļ elder Kometo Albōt subvert and dismantle boundaries of time, culture, and religion.Through lighthearted dialogue, Kometo explores serious histories of imperial abuse, war, atomic bomb testing, ideologies of social power, decolonization, Christianity, magic, sex, and death. He plays upon a range of ambiguities such as the slipperiness of mythic discourse, ethnographic entanglements, ambivalent analogies about Americans, cosmological musings about Western and Indigenous deities, the complexities of matrilineal kinship and modern manifestations of power, the interplay of magic within politics and religion, the social efficacy of ideologies of deception and revelation through divination, the way by which risky topics and profane stories bring the sacred into relief, and prophecies that presage the end of culture and the death of the trickster.In this way of relating, the boundaries blur between ethnographer and subject and the theories of myth and folklore—all become part of the dialogic process. The author critically attends to his positionality, as well as to how Kometo slyly positions them through his jokes and in drawing the author into trickster mythologies. Written in a narrative style that combines transcribed dialogue, poetic ethnographic descriptions, applied theory and sharp analysis, and storytelling, this book grants us insight into a decade-long friendship and honors the wisdom of a trickster.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 20. Nov 2024)