Jana Kopelentova Rehak - The Politics of Joking: Anthropological Engagements

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 a space for restoring human dignity.

Jana Kopelent Rehak is a Researcher in Anthropology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, USA and a Lecturer at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

First published 2019

by Routledge

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2019 selection and editorial matter, Jana Kopelent Rehak and Susanna Trnka; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Jana Kopelent Rehak and Susanna Trnka to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Names: Rehak, Jana Kopelentova, 1968- editor. | Trnka, Susanna, editor.

Title: Politics of joking : anthropological engagements / edited by Jana Kopelent Rehak and Susanna Trnka.

Description: London; New York : Routledge, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018028170 (print) | LCCN 2018044302 (ebook) | ISBN 9780429457265 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138314047 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138314054 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780429457265 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: Political satireSocial aspects. | Wit and humorPolitical aspects. | Black humor.

Classification: LCC PN6149.P64 (ebook) | LCC PN6149.P64 P66 2019 (print) | DDC 808.7dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018028170

ISBN: 978-1-138-31404-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-31405-4 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-0-429-45726-5 (ebk)

Fikret Berkes is Distinguished Professor at the Natural Resources Institute, University of Manitoba, and Canada Research Chair in Community-based Resource Management. His research is in the area of interconnected human-environment systems, and deals with commons theory, resilience and traditional ecological knowledge. He has some 30 years experience working with Canadian indigenous peoples (Cree, Ojibwa, Dene and Inuvialuit) and some international indigenous groups. His books include Sacred Ecology (third edition, 2012) and Coasts for People (2015).

John Carty is the Head of Anthropology at the South Australian Museum, and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Adelaide. He has worked extensively with Aboriginal artists and custodians throughout Australia on art, history and health projects. Some of his recent books include Patrick Tjungurrayi: Beyond Borders (2015); Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation (2015); Desert Lake: Art, Science and stories from Paruku (2014); and Ngaanyatjarra: Art of the Lands (2012). He has curated and contributed to several major exhibitions, including Yidaki: Didjeridu and the Sound of Australia (2017), Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route (2010). His research explores new methodologies and models for bringing Aboriginal voices and values into dialogue with mainstream narratives of Australian history, Australian art history, and with museum collections.

Jana Kopelent Rehak is a cultural anthropologist, Researcher and faculty member at the University of Maryland. She is the author of the book Recovering Face: Czech Political Prisoners (2013), addressing issues of social suffering, violence, national identity, communication, reconciliation and memory in the context of post-socialist Central Eastern Europe. Her most recent research embraces a range of issues such as work and aging in coastal environments, and urban social inequality in Baltimore, USA.

Neringa Klumbyt is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Miami University, Ohio. Her articles have appeared in American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Slavic Review, East European Politics and Societies, and other journals. She is a co-editor (with Gulnaz Sharafutdinova) of Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 196485 (2012). Her major work explores structures and phenomenology of power in Soviet and post-1991 Lithuania.

Jos E. Limn is the Director of the Institute for Latino Studies at the University of Notre Dame where he also holds the endowed Julian Samora Professorship in Latino Studies as well as the endowed Notre Dame Professorship in American Literature in the Department of English. He is also Concurrent Professor of American Studies and Anthropology. Limn has published on a variety of topics in USMexico cultural studies and on US Southern literature in a wide range of scholarly journals and in four books. The first, Mexican Ballads, Chicano Poems: History and Influence in Mexican-American Social Poetry (1992), received an Honorable Mention award for the University of Chicago Folklore Prize for a distinguished contribution to folklore scholarship, while his second book, Dancing with the Devil: Society and Cultural Poetics in Mexican-American South Texas (1994) was named as the winner of the 1996 American Ethnological Society Senior Scholar Prize for a vital and contentious contribution to ethnology. A third book, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture in 1998, and his most recent book is Amrico Paredes: Culture and Critique (2012). He has also edited the writings of Jovita Gonzlez, Texas historian and folklorist, in two volumes, Caballero: A Historical Novel (1995) and Dew on the Thorn (1997). He also has two other book projects in progress: Hispanic Self-Fashioning: The Making of a Mexican-American Middle Class Identity and Neither Friends, Nor Strangers: Mexicans and Anglos in the Literary Making of Texas.

Noelle Mol Liston is a cultural anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in New York Universitys Expository Writing Program. Her widely reviewed book, Labor Disorders in Neoliberal Italy: Mobbing, Well-being and the Workplace, published in 2011, which emerged as Italy transitioned from a safeguarded to an uncertain neoliberal labor economy. In addition to receiving research grants from institutions like Fulbright IIE, The German Marshall Fund, and The Council for European Studies, her work has appeared in journals including