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Paper short abstract:

Based on two separate accounts of humour and play in Uttar Pradesh, northern India: with young women and the police, this paper delves into the ethics of writing about fun. It questions how the anthropological focus on “story-telling” (McGranahan 2020; Mathur 2022) is reductive for anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is based on two separate accounts of humour and play in Uttar Pradesh, northern India. The first set draws on young women, with whom I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in 2015-16, who have invented a new form of love that they call “enjoying”. This form of love involves jokes, naughty gestures that bring fun and play into women’s lives. The second set include the policemen, during fieldwork in 2022-23, who tell jokes caricaturising people’s distress. These moments of jokes, police told me, were to lighten the mood, as the police tried to get a laugh from the distressed party. Trying to parse the jokes in these two sets of “fun”, relaying the context, and making the readers see and even experience the fun in writing seemed ethically palpable in the first case, but morally dubious in the case of the policemen. By drawing on the ethics of writing about fun, I ask how an anthropological focus on “story-telling” or the outputs of the research (McGranahan 2020; Mathur 2022) deflects from the difficult task of deep hanging out in the field. Hanging out in the field, developing empathy in the contexts where “fun” is inappropriate, points at how the presence of the ethnographer shifts power. Ethnographic fieldwork, therefore, is a politically powerful way for anthropologists to engage in the world, that should also be considered as one of the outputs of ethnographic research.