Though it deals with a common folkloristic subject, the trickster, David Williams’ incredibly sweeping work, The Trickster Brain: Neuroscience, Evolution, and Narrative, is not a book about folklore. Neither is it a study of comparative mythology or folk narrative. The Trickster Brain is, instead, Williams’ exploration into why “the study of literature (oral and written) needs new paradigms built upon scientific foundations in order to be credible” (5). Its central argument—that self-contradicting trickster narratives and characters realized in oral and written literature around the world result from and show the true nature of “the human brain that is often at odds with itself” (xv)—posits science, especially evolution science, as a great window into the biologically governed universalities of conflicted human nature. For Williams, the essence of human nature remains humans’ animalistic “obsessions with hierarchy and status” or “constant desires for food and sex” which are simultaneously paired with humans’ deep ethics and capabilities “of intelligence, empathy, and love” (267).
To make his case, Williams proposes to “walk through pre-history, history, anthropology, evolutionary biology, psychology, the humanities, and literature while diving into the new realm of neuroscience” (5). This walk-through amounts to nothing less than a synopsis of scientific explanations of or paradigms for understanding the brain (chapter 3), evolution (chapter 4), sex (chapter 5), love and war (chapter 6), music (chapter 7), ethics (chapter 8), and, of course, God (chapter 10). All this happens before the reader is provided with a selection of trickster stories “from around the world” alongside smaller amounts of contextualization (compared to the scientific chapters) in chapters 12-19. A short concluding chapter 20 reiterates the book’s central argument via an anecdote of the author’s meeting with Sioux holy men in the 1970s.
The book is best considered in two halves: the first half dealing with the scientific evidence concerning language, love, war, and the like; and the second half dealing with examples of trickster tales.
To begin, Williams plainly states (repeatedly) that his analyses are based upon scientifically founded, empirical evidence, which unlike the subjectively biased evidence in the humanities “can be proved false” (17). In light of this evidence, Williams takes up the rhetorical position of Steven Pinker’s well-known Blank Slate (2002), which includes Pinker’s argument against the Standard Social Science model’s focus on variation. For Pinker and Williams, the scientific, universal perspective amalgamated from so much empirical evidence is far more privileged than the relativist perspective of the humanities. Unfortunately, Williams does not address the empirical designs of folkloristic motif-indexes and tale-types.
Predictably, Williams’ Pinkerian stance quickly turns into a discussion of human universals. This is the first place that folklorists will resist Williams’ scientific summaries. At times, The Trickster Brain’s scientific, universalist position simply produces confusing sentence constructions like, “Universally, everyone tends to think his or her language or dialect is superior” (18). At other times, these universalist tendencies produce highly speculative, essentialist arguments. Williams, for example, offers the following summation of his chapter on music’s inevitable ties with love, sex, and evolutionary natural selection (chapter 8):
“For in both music and language there is the very ancient linkage to sexuality, and there is every reason to think that this is what led to the emergence of both. […] We wear iPods around our neck to give our lives a soundtrack. Many people associate certain songs with time periods that were important to us […] This explains the tendency people have to become locked into the songs of their teen years, when hormones and emotions were running full steam.” (85)
In this typical example, Williams is happy to ignore folk (or socioeconomic) groups who do not have access to or a desire for iPods, and he offers no “empirical” evidence for the human tendency to linger on the songs of our teens.
It should also be noted that Williams’ scientific summaries are best described as stemming from evolutionary psychology and comparative psychology, not neuroscience and evolution studies proper as the title suggests. Moreover, within these fields, he does not always accurately depict the contentious nature of his cited materials. In the context of comparative psychology, for example, Williams is quick to argue the similarities of humans and animals. After mentioning (but not citing) Sneddon et al’s contentious argument that fish “know” pain, Williams recklessly claims in his chapter on evolution, “For nothing discovered through science shows us as fundamentally different from the rest of the animal kingdom” (38). While Williams’ point here is that humans developed via evolutionary processes (not intelligent design), his hurry to hush up those who believe in God leaves several holes in his depiction of the landscape of comparative psychology. As a matter of fact, a substantial contingent of comparative psychologists like Daniel Povinelli, Derek Penn, and Jennifer Vonk, who work completely within an evolutionary frame, argue that despite the fact that biological similarities exist between humans and other animals, the human mind operates fundamentally differently—even when compared with other primates (see Povinelli 2003; 2012). All in all, folklorists should consult the source materials of the contemporary sciences of mind when weighing Williams’ scientific summaries.
Williams’ more successful second half of The Trickster Brain features forty-one trickster stories—seventeen of which are from North America—divided into analytical categories such as sex, females, music, and clowns. Commentary in these latter chapters focuses on the contradictory nature of the trickster, who is simultaneously human and animal, good and evil. The second half also includes a chapter on literary tricksters that cites works from writers like Hurston and Twain alongside singers like Springsteen and Dylan in order to show that trickster characters pop up “in some form in every element of media” (259). Williams also devotes a chapter to the trickster as realized in the American blues singing traditions; he cites works from artists like Ma Rainey and Blind Lemon Jefferson as graphic illustrations of music’s inevitable connection to sex (255).
Taken as a whole, The Trickster Brain can be admired for its lofty goal, which is to connect a kind of cross-culturally realized narrative element to the biological design and function of the human brain. Folklorists may also admire Williams’ willingness to work across disciplinary lines, but we should recognize that interdisciplinary success requires expertise across many domains and that the quest to reconcile experimentally derived biological knowledge with the vastness of human narratives remains incomplete.
Works Cited
Pinker, Steven. 2002. The Blank Slate. New York: Viking.
Povinelli, Daniel J. 2003. Folk Physics for Apes: The Chimpanzee’s Theory of How the World Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
---. 2012. World Without Weight: Perspective on an Alien Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rose, J.D. 2002. “The Neurobehavioral Nature of Fishes and the Question of Awareness of Pain.” Reviews in Fisheries Sciences 10:1-38.
Sneddon, L.U., Braithwaite, V.A., and Gentle, M.J. 2003. “Do Fish Have Nociceptors: Evidence for the Evolution of a Vertebrate Sensory System.” Proceedings of the Royal Society, series B.
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[Review length: 1146 words • Review posted on February 12, 2014]