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Paper short abstract:

This paper wrestles with the claim that joy does not reside primarily in human sociality. For a group of Baptist Christians in Harare, joy is welcome disruption, given from beyond the realm of human relations. It then demands response in daily life.

Paper long abstract:

This paper wrestles with the claim that joy does not reside primarily in human sociality. A Durkheimian focus on social cohesion might take social life as a key source of joy, or at the very least, the location of its experience. While placing high value on kin and other relations, Baptist Christians in Zimbabwe’s capital city regularly reject the prospect that their human ties are to be the source of their joy. This is not to say that relationships cannot be joyful, but rather to emphasise that joyfulness emerges not from human sociality but from beyond or outside of it. Joy, they reiterate, is God’s gift. The appropriate response is to rejoice.

What, then, is this gift of joy? Drawing on fifteen months of ethnographic research, I examine how these middle-class Baptists outline joy: as disruption of the presumed order of everyday life. This is not the more colloquial understanding, they recognise: joy needs “redefinition”, as one interlocutor put it. For these residents of Harare, astronomical hyperinflation and political upheaval persistently stymie everyday efforts to travel to work, obtain medicine for a loved one, or charge one’s cell phone. Disruption, then, is a welcome intervention in the uncertainties that characterise existing patterns and ways of being.

Marilyn Strathern (2020) has argued that Anglophone anthropology sees its central task as identifying relations, presumed to possess a necessarily positive valence. A view of joy as disruptive gift offers an opportunity to consider that which arises as intervention from elsewhere than human relationality.