Abstract This article describes how residents and staff of an eldercare and Alzheimer's home in a small South African town joke with each other. Residents are mostly white and staff mostly black, but there are exceptions, and both groups are multilingual. Jokes between the two groups in the home are racialized, if not sometimes racist, in light of historical and contemporary post-apartheid socio-political and economic circumstances. Yet the relations between these two groups are forged mostly in joking about residents’ diminished cognitive and bodily abilities, staff work, multilingualism and interpersonal ties. In describing joking encounters in three ethnographic scenes, the article traces the ways in which age and race combine in institutionalized relationships of dependency to innovate social theory about human mutuality from the vantage point of multiracial, multicultural, postcolonial Africa.

中文翻译：

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灰色的相互关系：南非疗养院的种族和开玩笑关系

摘要 本文描述了南非一个小镇的老年护理和阿尔茨海默病之家的居民和工作人员如何互相开玩笑。居民多为白人，工作人员多为黑人，但也有例外，两个群体都通晓多种语言。鉴于历史和当代后种族隔离的社会政治和经济环境，家庭中两个群体之间的笑话被种族化了，即使有时不是种族主义。然而，这两个群体之间的关系主要是通过开玩笑说居民认知能力和身体能力下降、员工工作、使用多种语言和人际关系。在描述三个民族志场景中的玩笑遭遇时，