The field work for this study had its beginnings on July 17, 1965, when, in the Western Apache community of Cibecue, I witnessed a joking imitation of ‘the Whiteman’ for the first time. For the next ten summers, while also working on other projects, I collected additional joking texts and in close collaboration with Apache consultants from Cibecue started to develop a framework for interpreting them. In the fall of 1975, one of my consultants said to me, “Stop. You've bothered it too much already.’ So I stopped. Funding for my research was provided by grants from the American Philosophical Society, The Center for the Study of Man (Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.), and the Doris Duke American Indian Oral History Project. Needless to say, I am grateful to these organizations for their support.

The first draft of this essay was written in 1976 while I was a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey. The final draft was completed during my tenure in 1978 as a Weatherhead Fellow at the School of American Research, Santa Fe, New Mexico. In between, portions of the essay were read at the Institute for Advanced Study; Yale University; Princeton University; the University of New Mexico; and, most recently, at the University of Western Ontario.

I have benefited from the comments and criticisms of many people. To Clifford Geertz, my host for a thoroughly stimulating year at the Institute for Advanced Study, I am indebted for consistently rewarding discussions about ethnography and problems in cultural interpretation. I am also grateful to Thomas Kuhn and Victor Turner, who deepened my understanding of nonostensive semantics and the symbolic structure of ritual drama, respectively. Others have helped in other ways, including Harry Basehart, Richard Bauman, Philip Bock, Harold Conklin, Mac Chapin, Chet Creider, Bill Douglas, James Fernandez, Hildred Geertz, Floyd Lounsbury, Christopher Middleton, Scott Rushforth, David Sapir, Harold Scheffler, David Schneider, Henry Selby, and Joel Sherzer.