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Published June 1st, 2025 from Vancouver, Canada
A couple of years ago, I wrote a paper about clowns for the DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society journal, titled "The Circus of Liberation: Clowning as Social Creativity in Insane Clown Posse's Dark Carnival" (Begg, 2024). In it, I argue that the Midwestern hip-hop band Insane Clown Posse (ICP) don't just dress up like clowns, but are using clowning as a technique to create an egalitarian working-class community.
The anthropology of clowning is a weird, wonderful, and pretty dated sub-field. Most of the clown theory I was using was published in the 1970s and 1980s, and is itself often based on ethnographies of Indigenous peoples from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. All this is solidly part of the grandiose modernist project we now call classical anthropology.
I love classical anthropology. It is a tradition with a startling humanity, which has given us universal concepts like taboo, kinship, and value. These gifts remain relevant today, and I think it is a shame that this body of work isn't more widely known among young anthropologists or taught in intro classes. But it is not always easy to work with, either. The research I drew on while writing my paper is full of analysis of taboos, symbolism, ritual boundaries and other stuff that, frankly, nobody cares much about any more. More urgently, a lot of classical ethnographic sources can be ethically dubious and may be full of unreliable cultural analysis.
Most early anthropologists were critics of imperialism and colonialism, but were still writing in a time when European colonial empires dominated the globe. They were mostly White people working with Indigenous peoples who were actively being colonised. As you would expect, many early anthropologists held racist beliefs, consciously or unconsciously. In turn, many Indigenous peoples have said that anthropologists acted extractively towards their communities and misrepresented them.
For all of these reasons, it can be very challenging to draw on classical ethnographic work today. I don't want to cite something which is harmful to the Indigenous peoples it discusses or is just plain inaccurate. When I chose to cite dated work in this paper, I decided I would systemically vet my sources by cross-referencing them with Indigenous knowledges.
One of my supervisors recently pointed out that it would be helpful to future scholars to document how I've gone about this. I thought I could explain some of my choices in greater detail here, which I'll do by going through the four types of sources I had to work with.
It seemed best to cite Indigenous scholars writing on their own cultures where possible. I relied on two main Indigenous scholars for the paper: Alfonso Ortiz, a Tewa anthropologist whose position as a cultural insider set him aside from the many other scholars writing on the clown societies of the American southwest, and (2) Vilsoni Hereniko, an artist and performance scholar from the Fijian island of Rotuma in the South Pacific. He wrote a paper (1994) and then a book (1995) about clowning in Rotuma and across Polynesia which makes a connection between political satire and clowning, something I also found happening in the Midwest.
In addition, there is brief quote from Elsie Clew Parsons' (1917) Notes on Zuni which reinforced my feeling that the clown was a worthwhile cross-cultural category to keep talking about. Referencing a Zuni clown society, Parsons notes: “Zuni who have seen our clowns call them American newekwe” (1917, 232). A statement like this affirms that clowning is a genuine cross-cultural phenomenon which is visible not only to settler anthropologists, but to ordinary Indigenous people. If comparative anthropology has a future, it needs to be moored in moments of self-recognition like this rather than inferences by academics.
In an encyclopedic 1897 monograph on "The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl² Indians", the famous German-American anthropologist Franz Boas describes the activities of the nułamał¹, a class of axe-toting jesters who act ridiculously—playing with mucus flowing from their huge fake noses—whilst using real violence to enforce the ritual rules at events like potlatches. I cited Boas' description the nułamał throwing stones at people and destroying property as an example of the ritualized clown violence also used by Insane Clown Posse.
While much of this is pure description, I had doubts about the accuracy of Boas' interpretations. It was unclear to me how theatrical this violence was or how seriously intimidated ritual participants would be by these hijinks. Fortunately, I was able to cross-reference Boas' descriptions with information on the website of the U'Mista Cultural Society (2025), a Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw² cultural education service.
Laura Makarius' 1970 paper "Ritual Clowns and Symbolical Behaviour" is a symbolic analysis of blood and urine in clowning rituals across multiple Indigenous cultures. It contains both very useful descriptions of Zuni nekwekwe and Hopi koyesmi clowns, but is built around a terribly arcane analysis of symbolism and taboo. Makarius has a lot of creative ideas about how this blood might represent medicine, incest, death, or womanhood, that I am quite leery about. There's certainly not many quotes from Indigenous interlocutors that would suggest that they see the same symbolism here that she does.
I was interested by Makarius' paper because I had noticed that Insane Clown Posse engaged in a similar kind of ritual play with bodily fluids (in their case, semen and blood). I ended up arguing that ICP use these 'dirty' fluids to invert and parody classist stereotypes about violence and sexuality. Makarius' paper helped me to make this argument, and in the end I chose to cite her discriptions only. While symbolism and meaning are interpretive and open to miscommunication or wishful thinking, her physical descriptions of how blood and urine were being deployed—sprayed onto onlookers, smeared on one another's faces—seemed fairly unambiguous and less likely to be blatant misrepresentations.
The biggest ethical challenge I had writing this paper, and the one which prompted me to think more seriously about my sources, was a book chapter written by Israeli anthropologist Don Handelman (2009). Handelman specialises in the structure of rituals: their internal logics, the stages they move through, and when transformation takes place. It can get pretty abstract, but this chapter makes some intriguing arguments about what ritual fluids have to do with social change. It does so by drawing on an unpublished conference paper from 1979 by Alfonso Ortiz about a teenage Tewa boy who is being initiated into the clown society.
I found this article very exciting when I first read and began to understand it. It was only several months later that I noticed what Handelman had tucked away in a stray footnote: Ortiz' paper had remained unpublished because the Tewa clown society did not want him to reveal the cosmological secrets it contained. Ortiz circulated the paper privately—hence how Handelman had a copy—but never published it. This embargo held from 1979, past Ortiz' death in 1997, until Handelman chose to break it thirty years later. He explains in the footenote: "I am doing so because in his paper is a revolutionary understanding of ritual clowning, not to be found elsewhere. Yet, my heart is heavy" (2009, 311).
This is one of the most blatant ethical violations an anthropologist could make. Obviously, I could not in good conscience cite this paper. I am not sure why Handelman decided to release this information, after so many years, to an obscure German volume of literary studies which has racked up a single-digit number of citations in the decade since its release. The chapter stands as an example of citation at its most vain and amoral.
At their best, the grand theories of classical anthropology—structuralism³ and functionalism⁴—gave us systematic ways to see the commonalities between how Melanesian tribes exchanged shell-necklaces at the turn of the century and zero-waste Facebook groups in the 2020s. Such an ambitious project can be the starting-point for some truly beautiful insights into what it means to be human. But these theories also emerged from an era of colonialism and ethnocentrism, and could at their worst be reductive and eventually became an empty exercise in indexing.
For me, classical concepts like the clown have a vitality and timelessness that makes them still worth using. I hope that this article can be helpful for others who want to draw on the liveliness of this tradition whilst trying to redress the ethical dilemmas and inaccuracies that this era of scholarship is often tainted with.
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¹ Roughly pronounced 'noo-kh-le-mal-kh'
² The term 'Kwakiutl' originally referred to a single community (today called the Kwaguʼł) whom Franz Boas worked with on Vancouver Island, but which has been erroneously used since to refer to all related groups who speak the Kwak'wala language. This is a bit like calling everyone from Ontario a Torontonian. The proper term for this cultural/linguistic group is Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw (roughly pronounced 'kwuk-wucky-wuck'), which means 'people who speak Kwak'wala'.
³ The theory that all human societies are underpinned by the same 'deep structure', which manifests in superficially different ways at different places and times. A basic structuralist idea would that an English vicar and a Samoyedic shaman can both be talked about as 'ritual specialists'.
⁴ The theory that human societies are always trying their best to function smoothly, and that our cultural beliefs and rituals exist to create a stable social structure. A basic functionalist claim would be that monogamy exists to minimise conflict over partners, by pairing people off in exclusive couples.
Begg N (2024). The circus of liberation: Clowning as social creativity in insane clown posse’s dark carnival. DIY, Alternative Cultures & Society, 2(2), 143-161. https://doi.org/10.1177/27538702241240015
Boas F (1897) The social organization and secret societies of the Kwakiutl Indians. _Report of the US National Museum for_ 1895: 311–738.
Handelman D (2009) Clowns in ritual: Are ritual boundaries lineal? Moebius-like? In: Gvozdeva K, Werner R (eds) _Risus Sacer - Sacrum Risibile_. Bern: Peter Lang, 307–325.
Hereniko V (1994) Clowning as political commentary: Polynesia, then and now. _The Contemporary Pacific_ 6(1): 1–28.
Hereniko V (1995) _Woven Gods: Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma_. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press.
Makarius L (1970) Ritual clowns and symbolical behaviour. _Diogenes_ 18(69): 44–73.
Ortiz A (1972) Ritual drama and the pueblo world view. In: Ortiz A (eds) _New Perspectives on the Pueblos_. Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 135–161.
Parsons EC (1917) Notes on Zuni. Lancaster, PA: American Anthropological Association.
U’mista Cultural Society (2023) Nułamał: Fool Dancer. Available at: https://umistapotlatch.ca/objets-objects/index-eng.php?nojs=true&object=80.01.009