Peggy V. Beck

Who is Peggy V. Beck?

Peggy V. Beck is an American author known for her research on fool archetypes and ritual clowns. She has written about the Fool as a psychopomp, a guide who reveals the chaotic logic of the universe by way of creative double binds, nonsense and dreams. Her research on ritual clowns includes studies of masked figures in Africa, North America, South America and Europe. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness in 1974 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the direction of Gregory Bateson, whose own work was predicated on the idea that "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet/Are of imagination all compact"1

She did fieldwork on the intersection of "seers" and humor in San Juan Cotzocon, Mixe, Oaxaca, Mexico in 1974. Beck worked on the Navajo Nation from 1974-1978 where she developed Navajo-based curriculum and texts in Native American studies. She taught humanities at the University of New Mexico and at New Mexico Highlands University from 1979-1983.

In 1987 Peggy Beck received a National Endowment Folk Arts Award to record and film rural Spanish musicians, poets, and masqueraders who participate in midwinter rituals and feasts unique to northern New Mexico. The far reaches of the Spanish frontier along the Rio Grande into Colorado harbored Crypto-Jewish families who, like Pueblo Indian religions, were forced, by the Spanish Inquisition, to hide or disguise their religious practices. Beck's documentation of the "aguelos", masked animal-like, whip-carrying ogres who would appear around bonfires called "luminarias", reveals not only Indian-Spanish-Basque dramatic hybridization, but also the possibility that, in the past, "aguelos" were secretly observing the Jewish Festival of Lights. The materials for this project are archived in the Library of Congress.