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- Convenors:
-
Victoria Tecca
(University College London)
Claire Moll Namas (London School of Economics)
Marie Cornelia Grasmeier (Universtität Bremen)
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- Stream:
- Irresponsibility and Failure
- Sessions:
- Monday 29 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Humour has typically been theorised as a coping mechanism or a 'weapon of the weak'. This panel will examine the ways that humour can be employed as a tool for highlighting systemic irresponsibility and failure, particularly for those who cannot rely on traditional justice systems.
Long Abstract:
Humour has typically been theorised as a coping mechanism or 'weapon of the weak'. Anthropologists have long analysed humour as is found in joking relationships, as recognition of kinship or other social bonds, or of its use in religion, amongst others. Existing work also positions humour as a tool of resistance for the disempowered, yet this often serves to reiterate the notion that one's subjugated position is inescapable and static, emphasising the futility of defiance.This panel examines how humour can illuminate systemic irresponsibility and failure particularly for, but not limited to, those unprotected by traditional justice systems including sex workers and undocumented migrants. The convenors invite discussion of the potential for humour to responsibilise the state or other parties for the production of symbolic and structural violence. We encourage papers that draw on ethnographic accounts of how humour can not only mediate failing social relations - or relations which produce subjugation and inequity - but serve to increase tensions by explicitly naming an unequal power relation as a failure in and of itself. We also invite papers that speak to the embodied process of telling jokes and laughter, its affective qualities, and the banal experiences of humour that inflect in informants' lives. Guided by these various facets of humour, this panel draws together widely ranging ethnographic work - which may have otherwise not entered into conversation with one another - to develop a deeper understanding of how the serious study of humour can significantly contribute to studies of failure, irresponsibility, and systemic violence.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Monday 29 March, 2021, -Io Chaviara (Panteion University of Athens)
Paper short abstract:
PASOK, the first greek socialist-democratic party, during the greek crisis has been transformed from an object of credibility & worship into a cult, trash & troll object. Throughout this paper the relation between laughter, national imaginative & crisis’ reasoning -blaming narratives is highlighted.
Paper long abstract:
PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) was the first socialist-democratic party in Greece. After achieving a landslide victory in the 1981 parliamentary elections it dominated the political landscape in Greece. Apart from 19 years in power, it had overwhelming support in unions, local administrations, grass-roots organization, etc. In 2010, the year the Greek financial crisis was introduced as such in the international and national media, PASOK was governing. In order to deal with the bailout, PASOK signed a memorandum with the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank. This signified the starting point of the humanitarian crisis that followed due to harsh austerity. During the years of the Greek crisis, PASOK has become a laughing matter. PASOK, 45 years after its founding, has been transformed from an object of credibility and worship into a cult, trash and troll object. PASOK the former Greek mass party is now being laughed at in various digital and physical spaces of everyday life (social media, theme parties, everyday use of language, etc). This paper reflects on the above mentioned “qualities" of PASOK as social practices and their functions in time of crises regarding the socio-political sphere and the national imaginative. Finally throughout this paper the relation between laughter and crisis’ reasoning (blaming) narratives is highlighted.
Mirco Göpfert (Goethe University Frankfurt) Melanie Brand (University of Konstanz) Cassis Kilian (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt)
Paper short abstract:
Together with cartoonists in Tehran, stand-up comedians in Berlin and satirical authors in Johannesburg, we explore humour as an epistemic practice of the political. We focus on those moments that reveal what can and cannot be said, where funny ends and serious begins.
Paper long abstract:
It is getting more and more difficult to distinguish serious from funny. How much of Boris Johnson's demeanour is deliberate self-ridicule? How much of satirical news formats like The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight is clownery, how much investigative journalism? Neoliberalism, urbanisation, migration, new technologies and especially the surge in populist politics produce uncountable social, cognitive and economic dissonances and disparities bordering the absurd. For cartoonists, comedians and satirists, observing these dissonances is an important tool for creating powerful punchlines seeking to make sense of and ridicule the status quo. (Ask Trevor Noah or John Oliver!) What artists identify to be of noteworthy ridiculous potential differs according to specific socio-political configurations. Together with cartoonists in Tehran, stand-up comedians in Berlin and satirical authors in Johannesburg, we explore humour as an epistemic practice of the political. In particular, we focus on the space between funny and serious: those moments that reveal what can and cannot be said, where silly ends and offensive begins. We argue that by bringing artists and anthropologists together, a collaborative exploration of humour sheds light on political configurations in the contemporary world far beyond the general assumption of, for example, repression in Tehran, cosmopolitanism in Berlin and postcolonial dis/entanglements in Johannesburg. Moreover, breaking with the privileged role of serious academic knowledge production it can also have an immense impact on the epistemic potential of anthropology. Or not.
Elena Sims Fejdi (University of East London)
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I will present the analysis of Bakhtinian female cosmetic rituals in the environment of direct sales cosmetics in Slovakia as instances of collective resistance to dominance.
Paper long abstract:
One of the main characteristics of these energetically costly and emotionally intense rituals were assertive laughter and lewd jokes that in Bakhtin's terms have the power to turn the existing hierarchies and power relations upside down. Women taking part in these rituals created a counter-culture of exaggerated femininity, bonding and ritual egalitarianism that was characterized by the morality of sharing, co-operation and reciprocity inhibiting any dominance hierarchy amongst the women.
Women in these carnivalesque cosmetic rituals accompanied by outbursts of shared laughter fostered the emergence of a temporal collective culture of reversal that subverted the individualism, competition and modesty of the expected everyday feminine behaviour in favour of loudness, joking, sharing, co-operation, immodesty and commitment to the female collectives. They reversed the economic logic of direct sales and replaced it with the moral economy of sharing.
In their ritual mode through collectively expressed agency women swung the 'pendulum of power' (Finnegan, 2013) and resisted the existing hierarchies between men and women. They collectively reversed the relationships of dominance to temporarily appropriate the social space in which these rituals were taking place for themselves.