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Accepted Paper:
Taking laughter seriously: trauma, memory and humour in two post-conflict settings.
Malte Gembus
(Coventry University)
Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo
(University of Bremen)
This paper elaborates on the practices and spaces of storytelling and memory-making and their intersections with humour, joking and laughter by engaging with two different post-war contexts: the Bangsamoro liberation struggle and the Guatemalan civil-war.
Paper long abstract:
Laughter and trauma are intimately entangled with one another. In the Cotabato region (Southern Philippines), Moro Islamic Liberation Front adherents would occasionally joke and laugh while telling stories of war atrocities and suffering inflicted on them and their communities by the Philippine state; equally jokes and laughter formed part of a theatre-play created by young people in Southern Mexico about the violence their parents and grandparents suffered during the Guatemalan civil-war. Such ethnographic moments are unpacked in this paper to elaborate on the practices and spaces of storytelling and memory-making and their intersections with humour, joking and laughter. By engaging two different contexts that however share certain features of internal warfare (Bangsamoro liberation struggle in the Philippines and the conflicto armado interno in Guatemala), this paper seeks to highlight how both spontaneous and crafted acts of humour and laughter contribute to the social making of moral communities. The past enters the present in the form of shared laughter that have individual and collective significance. That is, more than a means of dealing with trauma, such laughter and humour also (re)produce and reiterate community bonds. While comical acts can be viewed as disruptions in the context of civil war atrocities, loss and trauma; we instead propose understanding them as continuities of community-building, survival, and defiance amid the uncertainties and ruptures of post- and ongoing conflict.