Clowns in Anthropology

Clowns are exhilarating and disturbing, funny and frightening. They are ambiguous and confusing, yet capable of skilled disarranging and rearranging of our meaningful contexts. They can be found in rituals and courts as well as theaters and the circus. The clown is related to the trickster, who exists in stories and myths. The two figures share a contradictory, paradoxical nature and an affinity with play and humor. However, of the two the clown has received less attention. While there is a sustained scholarly discussion of the trickster, the clown has been written about rather sporadically, and there is little engagement between the texts beyond the fairly common statement that clowning is universal; interpretations usually conflict. Some authors write about clowning in a specific context based on their own fieldwork, but many others, mostly using the same ethnographic sources, attempt to provide a general view of ‘clowns’. The texts arrive at very different conclusions. In descriptive terms there are common features to clowning. These are inverted or contrary behavior, obscenity and taboo breaking, imitation and mockery of strangers, and exaggerated or otherwise inappropriate behavior. However, exactly what the clowns do is often described only vaguely. “Detailed descriptions of the clown’s place in public events are scarce” (Handelman 1990: 236).