Anthropological Quarterly

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.