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Africa Starts at the Pyrenees: Humor, Laughter, and Financial Recession in a Spanish Enclave in Morocco
Anthropological Quarterly ( IF 0.8 ) Pub Date : 2019-01-01 , DOI: 10.1353/anq.2019.0005
Brian Campbell

ABSTRACT:Located on the Mediterranean coast of Morocco, the Spanish enclave of Ceuta depends almost entirely on subsidies from Madrid. When the newly elected conservative government initiated a rigorous austerity regime in 2011, Ceuta quickly became Spain's "unemployment capital," and my fieldnotes started overflowing with stories of disorientation as personal life-trajectories collapsed and national narratives developed over four decades of modernization and Europeanization became untenable. However, my diaries also contain page upon page of informants telling jokes, sharing caricatures, and watching satirical videos mocking Spain's political classes and, ultimately, themselves. Answering a call by Angelique Haugerud (2013b), this article asks what anthropology can learn from local jokers and tricksters. Following Karin Barber (2005) and Nicolas Argenti (2016), and reading Ceuta's obscene humor as a form of textual practice warranting serious ethnographic investigation, I argue that tricksters, locally appreciated as excellent social analysts, have anticipated anthropological efforts to encourage lay audiences to rethink "the economy," often considered to be an abstract, natural force. Indeed, my informants' humor not only locates the crisis in human relations, but it also describes "neoliberal" discourses as an ideology used by the financial class to claim resources and redistribute blame. This article, however, urges caution when dialoguing with tricksters. The burgeoning literature on humor in times of crisis has tended to focus on showing that laughter is not merely a weapon of the weak, but a liberating practice that turns trauma into creativity, maintains solidarity, mobilizes political resistance, and is therefore central to social change. But my Ceutan informants often forget that tricksters are rarely the heroes they think they are. Their lewd jokes create conflict between the enclave's inhabitants, hindering effective political mobilization and reproducing gender, ethnic, and racial stereotypes that raise methodological and ethical problems for anthropology.

中文翻译:

非洲始于比利牛斯山脉:摩洛哥西班牙飞地的幽默、欢笑和金融衰退

摘要:位于摩洛哥地中海沿岸的西班牙飞地休达几乎完全依赖马德里的补贴。当新生的保守政府在2011年开始进行严谨的紧缩制度时,CEUTA迅速成为西班牙的“失业资本”,我的野外尚局开始溢出迷失方案,因为个人生活轨迹崩溃和在四十年的现代化和欧洲化发展中发挥了全国叙事站不住脚。然而,我的日记还包含一页又一页的线人讲笑话、分享漫画和观看嘲笑西班牙政治阶层以及最终嘲笑他们自己的讽刺视频。回答 Angelique Haugerud (2013b) 的电话,本文询问人类学可以从当地的小丑和骗子身上学到什么。继 Karin Barber(2005 年)和 Nicolas Argenti(2016 年),并阅读休达的淫秽幽默作为一种值得认真进行民族志调查的文本实践形式之后,我认为,在当地被认为是优秀的社会分析家的骗子已经预料到人类学的努力来鼓励非专业观众重新思考“经济”,通常被认为是一种抽象的、自然的力量。事实上,我的线人的幽默不仅将危机定位在人际关系中,而且还将“新自由主义”话语描述为金融阶层用来索取资源和重新分配责任的意识形态。然而,这篇文章敦促在与骗子对话时要谨慎。危机时期幽默的新兴文学作品往往侧重于表明笑不仅是弱者的武器,而是一种将创伤转化为创造力、保持团结、动员政治抵抗的解放性实践,因此是社会变革的核心。但我的 Ceutan 线人经常忘记,骗子很少是他们认为的英雄。他们的下流笑话在飞地居民之间制造了冲突,阻碍了有效的政治动员并再现了性别、民族和种族刻板印象,这些刻板印象引发了人类学的方法论和伦理问题。
更新日期:2019-01-01
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