Koshare, Koyemshi and the Clown Societies of the Pueblos

Ritual clowning is practiced across the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest through a set of named societies rather than a single shared institution: the Hopi Koyemshi (Mudheads), the Tewa Kossa known in English as Koshare, and other lineages specific to individual pueblos each maintain their own membership, regalia and calendar of appearances. Members typically perform during the same ceremonial dance cycles as the community's other ritual societies, appearing in distinctive body paint or costume that marks the role as separate from ordinary participants.

Anthropological accounts describe these societies as combining two functions that look separate from outside but are treated as one inside Pueblo religious life: providing comic relief during long ceremonies, and enforcing communal norms through mockery aimed at anyone, dancer or spectator, who has behaved badly since the last gathering. The license to mock is real license, extended to figures who in ordinary daily life carry no special authority at all, and its exercise during ceremony is understood as sanctioned correction rather than simple misbehavior.

Because membership, initiation and the specific content of performances belong to the closed religious life of each pueblo, this entry describes the societies only at the level already public in published ethnographic scholarship, and does not reconstruct or explain their practice as instruction.