Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love: How Tricksters Through History Have Changed the World

by Shepherd Siegel PhD

Overview

Comedian Richard Pryor narrated the George Floyd murder in 1979, forty years before it occurred. A murder no one is laughing about. Yet when Pryor tells the story in very raw terms, and with his comic talent, the audience laughs. As a time-traveling trickster, Pryor is preparing the audience, lubricating their psychic joints—spiritually, psychologically, politically—in a foreshadowing today’s reckoning. It can be checked out on Richard Pryor: Live in Concert (1979).

People and cultures draw on a mix of archetypes, the attributes of personality that make them who they are—Warrior, Caretaker, Magician, Fool, Hero, Sage—and Trickster. Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love is about how grownups who have retained the ability to playful as they were when a child view and behave in the world. Such a grownup will consciously or unconsciously engage with the Trickster, and Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love is about what could happen if society made more of that animating force. Today, an infantilized infatuation with the Warrior archetype tears society apart. The best response comes out of a more peaceful and playful approach. In a time of great political frustration and culture wars, readers will be looking for and will respond well to Tricking Power into Performing Acts of Love which casts a clear eye on the dilemmas and proposes the pursuit of fun and the refusal to take power seriously as a timeless and potent political strategy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631957307
Publisher:	Morgan James Publishing
Publication date:	05/31/2022
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Shepherd Siegel, PhD is an activist, previous professional rock and jazz musician, and educator in music, career + technical, and special education. His first teaching assignment was with youth in lockup in the County Juvenile Detention Center. Striving to make the greatest positive impact, he earned his doctorate from UC Berkeley while inventing innovative internship programs for troubled and troubling youth, including those with disabilities. Along the way, he played with the jazz trio Swingmatism and the power pop band Thin Ice. While more active as a writer, Dr. Siegel sustains a wide-ranging interest in music. He has written over 30 peer-reviewed and other published journal articles, a textbook that enjoyed two editions (Career Ladders), and the 2018 book Disruptive Play.

Dr. Siegel is uniquely qualified to train his playful lens on politics and culture and tease out the Trickster element as it has shown up, tickled society, and then just as quickly disappeared. His diverse academic background—degrees in music, career + technical, administration and special education, and studies in anthropology—equip his scholarly pursuits. His activism grows out of the new visions forged in the bohemia of the San Francisco Bay Area. His presentations and talks have established him as a reliable and entertaining public intellectual on the subject of tricksters in politics and culture. Born in Chicago, Dr. Siegel has lived the longest in the Bay Area and Seattle, where he now resides.

Editorial Reviews

"An activist scholar immersed in the Bay Area’s bohemian counterculture, Siegel shows a playful writing style, replete with puns and inside jokes, that mimics the Trickster archetype in using humor against the dark, powerful forces that drive contemporary politics and society. A compelling catalog of Tricksters and a convincing analysis of their power." -Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2022-11-10
An activist scholar explores the value of the Trickster archetype to contemporary society.

The Warrior archetype, writes author Siegel, has a firm grip on 21st-century American politics and culture, as reflected in a collective “infatuation with toxic masculinity.” From the popularity of the NFL to the “faux heroism” of QAnon conspiracy theorists, many Americans live “for the fight,” eschewing democratic virtues, believing “there is no loyal opposition, only enemies.” What America needs, this book argues, is more “Trickster energy” that laughs at the “carnival of errors known as society.” Not only do Trickster archetypes have no time for vengeance or violence in their pursuit of fun, but they often expose the dirty underbelly of society and the true motives of the powerful. Films made by the Marx Brothers, for instance, use slapstick humor as a vehicle for biting social critiques of elites and self-styled authorities. Folk stories crafted by enslaved Africans in the Americas used the West African Trickster god called Eshù Elégba to flip the narrative script about power dynamics between enslavers and the oppressed; they also highlighted the ways female Tricksters utilized clever chicanery to stave off “oppressive husbands, kings, and lovers.” Drawing on a diverse range of literature and films, this book begins with a thoughtful examination of shared attributes of Tricksters across genres, time periods, and cultures, from the Native American coyote and Zulu weasel to “The Fool” in King Lear and Bugs Bunny in Looney Tunes. Most, for example, are loners who have an ambivalence toward black-and-white morality (“they just want to have fun”). And while they revel in scatological humor, they’re powerful figures who use deception to undermine authorities. Connecting literary tropes to contemporary life, Siegel makes an effective case for the practical value of Tricksters. Sacha Baron Cohen’s menagerie of characters (who include Ali G., Borat, and Brüno) not only have provided global audiences with laughs, but also highlight latent biases in American culture. Borat, for example, convinced a bar-full of Arizonans to sing “Throw the Jew down the well,” and Brüno nearly started a homophobic riot in Arkansas by kissing a man in a cage fight. An activist scholar immersed in the Bay Area’s bohemian counterculture, Siegel shows a playful writing style, replete with puns and inside jokes, that mimics the Trickster archetype in using humor against the dark, powerful forces that drive contemporary politics and society. With a doctorate from UC Berkeley, Siegel is a skilled researcher who supports his argument with 250-plus endnotes that reflect his interdisciplinary approach to Tricksters, which combines history, sociology, anthropology, and literary criticism. Though the book’s firm command of the scholarly literature surrounding Tricksters will appeal to academics, its approachable, often jovial, writing style will also appeal to a wide audience. This emphasis on accessibility is reflected in the book’s ample references to popular TV shows and movies as well as its inclusion of dozens of photographs, posters, film stills, and other visual aids. And while the book’s politics are decisively leftist, which may alienate conservatives who by definition seek to preserve traditional institutions of power and authority, this is inevitable in a work that celebrates Tricksters who are notoriously “antistructure.”

A compelling catalog of Tricksters and a convincing analysis of their power.

Kirkus Reviews