Catherine Bell asserts that ritual is not an end, but just a means. To be precise, although ritualized activity serves as “a strategic arena for the embodiment of power relations”1 and is often effective in its application (convincing individuals of the legitimacy and normality of the existing power relations), it can be identified as merely a means to make artificial power relations seem more natural than alternative power relations. Ritualized activity aims to make one power structure seem more legitimate than all possible alternatives.

However, there are always those who remain unconvinced that the current structure is best. Robert Brightman’s “Traditions of Subversion and the Subversion of Tradition: Cultural Criticism in Maidu Clown Performances” (1999) examines the early 20th century rituals of the Maidu tribal society of Northern California that were attempts by tribesmen to dissuade members of their society from rejecting the political and cultural practices of the tribe. The Maidu Clown constituted an important component of the Maidu rituals. The Clown had a routine explicitly addressing notions of subversion to the existing tribal practices, depicting those as destructive thought practice that could lead only to unwanted consequences. Brightman concentrates on the effect of the Maidu Clown in achieving its aims with his culturally-accepted ritual of subversion. He posits that it is too simplistic to analyze the Maidu Clown’s ritual as either reasserting or incidentally subverting the current structure, he suggests instead that a clown’s performance was viewed by various individuals of the Maidu tribe who perceived the performance in an endless number of ways.2 While the Maidu Clown’s ritual reinforced the current tribal order for some, it could have subverted the tribal order for others by manifesting and making symbolically clear some vague or undeveloped notions of subversion existing latently within the minds of the Maidu audience.

Understanding the “societal clown” across multiple cultures lends us an appreciation of the Maidu Clown’s role.3 The societal clown can generally be defined as a culturally sanctioned antagonist to the existing structured society, who demonstrates within his/her ritualized performance either the great perils or the boundless freedoms that await those who subvert the current order of their society. Numerous cultures utilize a clown to ritualistically imbed a desire for the comfort and safety apparently contained within the existing order of power relations. Mihail Bakhtin defines the formulation of this subversive clown as a manifestation of functionalist conservatism: the clown convinces society of the reckless hedonism that would ensue if the established order crumbled. Brightman and many other contemporary scholars reject this functionalist conservatism interpretation, insisting that there are “genuinely subversive facets”4 to the clown’s ritualistic behavior. (That individuals perceive the clown’s rituals in different ways cannot be stressed enough.) Because of the varying reactions among witnesses, the clown can serve both to maintain and subvert the existing order.

The Maidu, like several other tribes in Northern California during the early 20th century, subsisted on the production of acorn, salmon, and deer-meat surpluses.5 Single or multi-family units often maintained their own surpluses, which, along with monetary currency (disk-shaped white clamshell beads measured in strings) and wealth objects (abalone, dentalium, stone beads, woodpecker scalps), came to signify the material wealth of a family. “Like most other Native Californian societies, Maidu society was hierarchical, exhibiting categorical or gradational distinctions between elite…commoner, and indigent status groups.”6 The village headmen or yeponi, who fulfilled hereditary requirements and were deemed physically strong or able for their positions by pre-existing members, exercised complete authority over matters both sacred and secular. “Commoners were a ‘silent majority’ in village populations, subject to the authority of the elite and required to subsidize the latter with labor and resources”.7 The Maidu Clown (ranging up to five clowns) was a yeponi who managed village labor, indoctrinated village rituals to the juveniles, instructed village girls on handling menstruation, and comically mimicked and resisted the orders of tribal leaders during seasonal rites that demanded dancing and fasting for hours, while the clown gleefully watched, eating acorn bread and smoking tobacco.8 The Maidu Clown’s antics could be ludicrous. As described by Barrett, “one of the clowns stationed himself before the captain and marched slowly backwards in step with him, while delivering joking remarks concerning the latter’s ability to sing”.9 The conspicuous subversion of the Maidu Clown and comical approach to egoism—an exaggerated sense of self-importance, provided a mechanism for the “silent majority” to laugh off any selfish or subversive desires, dismissing them as being as absurd as the clown himself.

“These statuses,” though, “were subject to some measure of manipulation.”10 Unintentionally, the tangible antics of the clown served to materialize and ground egoistic and selfish thoughts. In contemplating the Maidu Clown’s effectiveness in both fostering ideas that reaffirm the existing cultural structure in the minds of some Maidu individuals, and “denaturalizing”11 it in the minds of others, I will consider Brightman’s analysis of the Maidu Clown within the context of work from Stanley J. Tambiah and Catherine Bell. Analyzing Brightman’s work in relation to the work of these authors serves to coalesce some of the knowledge within the field of ritual studies around the case of the Maidu Clown.

Stanley J. Tambiah emphasizes that, as a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication, ritual tends to “enable the client to effect a cure or a reconciliation, to make a decision, to avoid a danger…to produce an orderly ongoing to social existence”.12 Thus, if the individual has the “right attitude,”13 meaning he/she has accepted the world as depicted through his/her culture’s rituals, then any challenges to the power relations within that society should be discarded by the individual as irrational. The role of the Maidu Clown’s ritualized performance was to vindicate individuals who dismissed subversive thoughts as selfish and irrational. The “right attitude” thrived in Maidu society when the “silent majority” deferred to the orders of the didactic yeponi, many of whom, in return, benefitted from a right to manage the labor of others.

Still, those yeponi who recognized the Maidu “right attitude”as a cultural construct remained “wishful (in) thinking that inversionary ritual can evoke commitment to the received cultural order”.14 Fortunately for those yeponi, many of the Maidu “silent majority” who identified the existing culture as a construct lacked the nerve to challenge their superiors. However, they vicariously challenged yeponi authority through the clown’s mimicry of the yeponi and their verbal orders. Many of those of the “silent majority” who were aware of the artificiality of Maidu power relations still preferred the safety implicit in the known social order.

Tambiah’s argument that effective symbolic ritual tends to “enable the client to…avoid a danger” helps to elucidate one of Brightman’s key observations. For this portion of the “silent majority” (those aware of the artificiality of culturally constructed power relations), the Maidu Clown’s performance did not reconcile doubts about the existing culture but, rather, effectively replaced them with greater ones about the counterculture. In analyzing the acts of begging for food and insolence in one Maidu Clown performance, Brightman points out that “far from enacting a purely imaginary representation of social transgression[,] the clown makes external reference to freeloading bums in daily life”.15 The Maidu Clown references an alternative lifestyle many Maidu would not prefer over their current one. For these individuals, the Maidu Clown has succeeded in securing their obedience to the current power structure by playing on their distaste for the possible alternative that awaits a subversive Maidu—freeloading as a vagabond.

In respect to the limitless possibilities regarding various interpretations of the Maidu Clown ritual, it is imperative to note that none of these interpretations is static. Rather, interpretation of the clown ritual is a method contingent upon “the set of habitual dispositions through which people ‘give shape and form to social conventions’”.16 The concept of habitus was developed by Pierre Bourdieu, but this definition was formed by Catherine Bell. Objective structures, the clown’s performance, can only be “realized (in infinitesimal ways) within the (subjective) dispositions”17 of its audience. For one group the Maidu Clown’s ritual may reaffirm that Maidu culture is “natural” and “right”; for another group it may elucidate ideas about the existing power relations as artificial yet still preferable to likely alternatives; for a third group the clown may solidify desires for egoistic pursuits that can no longer be repressed. Brightman writes that the “subversive clowns…possess the Janus-face capacity to point both towards the naturalization and towards the deconstruction of received convention…with a commensurate diversity of potential effect on peoples’ conduct and dispositions”.18

The clown’s ritual is constructed with definite purpose and intent. In light of the complicated matrix which embodies human communication, that the Maidu tribe could develop and engender within itself a majority consensus on determining the power relations crucial to maintaining such a society is remarkable. Ritual, by reinforcing original intent through meaningfully structured performative actions, provides a fairly objective center from which cultural dispositions are based. Within the Maidu Clown ritual lay central themes of Maidu society that could be accepted or rejected on an individual dispositional basis but which were largely adopted by the majority.

Brightman’s theory regarding the Maidu Clown aligns with previous theoretical assertions put forth by Tambiah and Bell. In rejecting Bakhtin’s functionalist conservatism principle, Brightman moves away from an analysis that asserts that the Maidu Clown’s performance is either helpful or subversive to maintaining the existing power structure. Brightman focuses, rather, on how the clown’s objective ritual can inspire various different and divergent thoughts within individuals of the audience. Instead of analyzing whether the ritual works or does not work in achieving its initial objective, Brightman concentrates on the dispositional process of interpreting the performance. Brightman acknowledges the complexities in viewing the post-performance actions of Maidu witnesses, emphasizing that not all of those who viewed the existing power structure as artificial decided to subvert it. The Maidu Clown ritual controlled neither how the performance was perceived nor how individuals decided to act upon their reactions to the performance. The ritual only asserted itself, elucidating and defining its objectives through the performative actions of the Maidu Clown. The Maidu Clown’s ritual performance aimed to reinforce the existing power relations as “natural” and “what is best”, but it also provided a potentially dangerous platform for ideas of subversion. §