Description
This book engages anthropologically with humor as political expression. It reveals how humor is in many instances central to human efforts to cope with political struggle and significant to understanding power dynamics in socio-political life. The chapters examine humor and joking activities across a diverse range of geographic areas and cultural contexts. The contributors consider humor as it is constituted in political anxiety, aggression and power, and when it becomes a tool to resist, repair, reconcile or make a moral claim. Collectively they demonstrate that humor can provide a powerful critique, a non-violent form of political protest and the space for restoration of human dignity.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Jana Kopelent Rehak
1.You've Got to be Joking: Asserting the Analytical Value of Humor and Laughter in Contemporary AnthropologyYasmine Musharbasch and John Carty
2. Disaster Humor in an Age of Truth-bending PoliticsNoelle Molé Liston
3. "Joke" Elections: Satirical Activism and Political Opposition in Lithuania
Neringa Klumbytė
4.When the Fearful Becomes Funny: Joke-Work in the Midst of ViolenceSusanna Trnka
5. Humor Against Forgetting: Joking in the Space of DeathJana Kopelent Rehak
6. Chisasibi Cree Hunters and Missionaries: Humor as Evidence of TensionFikret Berkes
7. Mexican Speech Play: History and the Psychological Discourses of PowerJosé E. Limón
8. The Flesh of Joking Relationships: A Study of Quechua Sexual Farce
Camille Riverti
9. Trickster In The Mirror of Play and Anthropological ImaginationVáclav Soukup
10. Trump's Two Bodies: The Trickster-Wrestler as a Political Type
Morten Axel Pedersen
11. "An Army of Comedy": Political Jokes and Tropic Ambiguity in the Trump EraMorten Nielson
Afterword: Not All Fun and Games: The Force of Humor in Political Life
Susanna Trnka
