Agnes Horvath is a founding and chief editor of International Political Anthropology. She taught in Hungary, Ireland and Italy, and was affiliate visiting scholar and supervisor at Cambridge University. She is the author of Modernism and Charisma, the co-author of The Dissolution of Communist Power: The Case of Hungary and Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking, and the co-editor of Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, Walling, Boundaries and Liminality and Divinization and Technology: The Political Anthropology of the Subversive.

Arpad Szakolczai is professor of sociology at University College Cork, Ireland and previously taught social theory at the European University Institute in Florence. He is the author of Max Weber and Michel Foucault: Parallel Life-Works, Reflexive Historical Sociology, Sociology, Religion and Grace: A Quest for the Renaissance, The Genesis of Modernity, Comedy and the Public Sphere, Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary, and Permanent Liminality and Modernity, and the co-author of Walking into the Void: A Historical Sociology and Political Anthropology of Walking and From Anthropology to Social Theory: Rethinking the Social Sciences.

Introduction Part 1: Presenting the Trickster 1. The Trickster in Anthropology: The Figure as seen from the Outside 2. Techniques of Trickster Entrapment: The Nets of Spiders and Magicians 3. Hermes the Trickster and the Kabeiroi: Moving Towards Evil 4. Plato's Theaetetus: The Sophists and Secret Trickster Knowledge 5. Vedic Tricksterology: Tricking the Body into Self-Destruction Part 2: Tracking Trickster Traces: Evil Machinations 6. Prehistoric Trickster: Archaic Outlines of Evil 7. The Troglodytes: Evil Protoscientific Methods for Transformation 8. Monsters: Creatures of the Flux 9. Evil Alchemy: The Incommensurable Concluding Comments: On Methodology in Tricksterology