These are exciting times for the trickster. As suggested above, the term trickster is used to describe a character that has "trickiness" as his main attribute and is adept at surviving by his "wits." Yet, absent from this description is any critical appraisal of the trickster concept. The comparative analyses of trickster types in varied American Indian cultural traditions often ignore the bias of the analysts. Indeed, some critics suggest that the trickster that we encounter when reading cross-cultural accounts is not the indigenous trickster, but the trickster through the eyes of the analyst. But even as scholarly accounts of tricksters were being debated, the trickster became, in the 1980s and 1990s, a paradigm for overturning accepted practices in the academic world. During the height of the postmodern movement in the humanities and sciences critics of the status quo invoked...