This paper is concerned with the way that laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation in talk among humanitarian aid workers as they describe their professional activities in settings of armed conflict. I first set out to situate my analysis within the tradition of work in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis (EM), exploring how that approach differs in significant ways from work in pragmatics and related traditions of discourse analytic research. Unlike the latter approaches, EM examines laughter for the intelligibility it is deployed by speakers to furnish, so that the presumption of laughter’s revelatory nature which characterizes a pragmatically-oriented analysis is seen as a participant resource for rendering the situated significance of actions visible by and for the involved parties of a given episode of interaction. Following this, I examine talk from open-ended interviews with aid agency operatives who work in Israel and the Palestinian Territories, exploring how laughter is employed to manage threats to interlocutor affiliation where the potential accusation of opportunism arises in accounts of personal job satisfaction as against the legitimacy otherwise afforded with an appeal to altruism and self-sacrifice. Where speakers attend to the criticism of humanitarian activity for its significance in affecting outcomes of warfare, the management of these different demands is accomplished in reflexive work to ironize their own and others’ formulations of motivation for pursuing humanitarian work.

中文翻译：

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欢笑的沧桑

本文关注的是在人道主义援助人员描述武装冲突中他们的专业活动时，如何利用笑声来应对对话者联系的威胁。我首先着手将我的分析置于民族方法学和会话分析（EM）的工作传统之内，探讨该方法与语用学和话语分析研究的相关传统有何重大不同。与后一种方法不同，EM会检查笑声，以了解说话者提供的可理解性，因此，以实用主义分析为特征的笑话的启示性质的推定被视为一种参与者资源，用于使行为的位置意义在给定的交互事件的参与方之间或对相关方可见。此后，我研究了与在以色列和巴勒斯坦领土工作的援助机构特工进行的不限成员名额访谈的谈话，探讨了如何利用笑声来应对对话者从属关系的威胁，因为个人工作满意度可能导致机会主义指责否则，合法性就会吸引利他主义和自我牺牲。发言者参加了对人道主义活动的批评，因为它对影响战争结果具有重要意义，