Bright-eyed Athena smiled and stroked him with her hand . . .
"You're bold, with subtle plans, and love deceit."
Zeus laughed aloud at the sight of his scheming child
so smoothly denying his guilt about the cattle.
My wife's early childhood was spent amid her father's Italian-American family in western Pennsylvania. Her uncles, aunts, and mostly older cousins were always around. Her grandmother even lived in their house for a time.
She tells a story about what it was like to grow up in such a household. Again and again, one of her uncles would say to her, when she entered the room where the adults had gathered, "Hey, I brought a present for you today! I left it in the kitchen. Why don't you go in there and get it!"
On the first and maybe the second of these occasions, she ran into the kitchen to discover . . . pots and pans. No present. And when she walked out of the kitchen, she was met with boisterous laughter.
From a tearful child's perspective, however, not quite so humorous. What in the world were those men thinking?
Anthropologists have made a close study of lying and trickery among modern-day Greeks. Juliet du Boulay, in Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village, John Kennedy Campbell, in Honour, Family and Patronage: A Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a Greek Mountain Community, and Ernestine Friedl, in Vasilika: A Village in Modern Greece, all remark on the early training of children in the arts of secrecy and lying. Du Boulay describes lying as “a practice so prevalent in this society as to be an institution” and as a talent “almost universally possessed,” while the villagers are said to possess “an extreme ingenuity in deceit” (172-73). Campbell remarks that among Sarakatsani men lying is a matter of both habit and principle (283), and Friedl makes the observation that “[o]lder children who have learned to turn the tables on their parents and try to deceive them are admired even as they are scolded” (80).
Here, I think, we have an opportunity to delve a little deeper into the trickster phenomenon.
In class, we pondered the fact that Athena and Zeus take such delight in the trickery of Odysseus and Hermes, respectively, even though the goddess and god are the intended victims of the deceit. Why aren't they more indignant?
Imagine that you live on a remote island. There are two clans living on the island: the shore clan and the mountain clan. You are a member of the shore group. A cousin of yours, a fellow clansman, tricks you into buying a sick horse. The horse dies shortly after the sale.
Now imagine the same scenario, except that you buy the horse from a member of the mountain clan.
Clearly, being duped by an insider is not the same as being deceived by an outsider. In the first scenario, you will probably have a chance at some point to turn the tables on your roguish cousin. Not only that: you can also feel some grudging respect for your cousin's wiliness. The important thing, the factor that trumps everything else, is that he's your cousin, he's "one of us." Next time, maybe, it'll be one of those mountain people he'll trick, and then you and the rest of your clan will have a good, long laugh. Together.
In the second scenario, though, where the deceiver is an outsider, you can see yourself only as a victim, unfairly treated. Your deep resentment is not mitigated by any other considerations. You cannot shift perspective, even a little bit, to see the incident through the eyes of the deceiver.
So much depends on perspective, doesn't it? When my wife's uncles played their trick on her -- we might call it a heartless trick -- they were thinking like those Greek villagers that anthropologists have studied. By tricking her, they did not seek to exclude her from their group. They did not imagine that they were preying on a gullible and naive child. Their laughter was not meant to be cruel.
Instead, they were saying, "This is what we do. This is who we are. To defend the boundaries that define us and exclude them, we do this." And, as with Athena, Zeus, and the people of Vasilika, those uncles would have been thrilled if one day in the future, my wife had convinced one of them that there was a present in the kitchen, just for him.
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