The trickster figure emerges in every inhabited culture of the earth.
Evidence
Set Pedro Urdemales beside the whole week’s gallery, and the picture is complete. From the Old World the trickster came (Reynard, Pedro, Anansi, the Hare); in the New World he was reborn and remade (Br’er Rabbit, Ti Jean, Pedro Urdemales) by peoples under slavery and conquest; and among the Indigenous nations he had always lived (Coyote, Raven, Iktomi). Everywhere, in every language of the Americas and the world, the same hope took the same shape: the little clever one who beats the big strong one. This is where the whole year’s gathering has led — to the recognition that this one figure, in a thousand shapes, belongs to ALL of humanity, and that in him, all the world’s peoples are, surprisingly, telling the same hopeful story. — , A Year of World Stories, 14879
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Similar trickster figures arise through independent invention or an ancient shared source. — , A Year of World Stories, 14910