Biographical Note
Peggy V. Beck, author, educator, received her PhD in the History of Consciousness in 1974 from the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the direction of Gregory Bateson. She taught humanities at the University of New Mexico and at New Mexico Highlands University from 1979-1983.
Beck attended Sarah Lawrence College where she received a B.A. in 1969. Beck had a keen interest in the phenomena of the fool and clown. Beck received a Wenner-Gren fellowship to study ritual clowns and shamans in the Sierra Mixe, Oaxaca, Mexico in 1974. Beck worked for four years at Diné College on the Navajo Nation where she wrote bi-cultural curriculum materials including the textbook, The Sacred: Ways of Knowledge, Sources of Life. The book was first published in 1977 by the Navajo Community College and was reprinted in 1990 by Northern Arizona Press in 1990. Beck lived in northern New Mexico in 1979 where she began teaching humanities at the University of New Mexico and New Mexico Highlands University. In 1986 she received a Folk Arts Program grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to mount an exhibit on New Mexican midwinter masquerades. Beck has written novels, poetry, and published essays relating to the fool in anthologies and in the journal Parabola.