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Practical Joking Cahiers d’études africaines 184 | 2006 Parentés, plaisanteries et politique Practical Joking Robert Launay Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/15404 DOI : 10.4000/etudesafricaines.15404 ISSN : 1777-5353 Éditeur Éditions de l’EHESS Édition imprimée Date de publication : 1 décembre 2006 Pagination : 795-808 ISBN : 978-2-7132-2129-3 ISSN : 0008-0055 Référence électronique Robert Launay, « Practical Joking », Cahiers d’études africaines [En ligne], 184 | 2006, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2008, consulté le 01 mai 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/etudesafricaines/15404 ; DOI : 10.4000/etudesafricaines.15404 © Cahiers d’Études africaines Cet article est disponible en ligne à l’adresse : http:/ / www.cairn.info/ article.php?ID_REVUE=CEA&ID_NUMPUBLIE=CEA_184&ID_ARTICLE=CEA_184_0795 Practical Joking par Robert LAUNAY | Editions de l’EHESS | Cahiers d’ ét udes af ricaines 2006/4 - 184 ISSN 0008-0055 | ISBN 9782713221293 | pages 795 à 808 Pour citer cet article : — Launay R., Practical Joking, Cahiers d’études africaines 2006/ 4, 184, p. 795-808. Distribution électronique Cairn pour Editions de l’EHESS . © Editions de l’EHESS . Tous droits réservés pour tous pays. La reproduction ou représentation de cet article, notamment par photocopie, n'est autorisée que dans les limites des conditions générales d'utilisation du site ou, le cas échéant, des conditions générales de la licence souscrite par votre établissement. Toute autre reproduction ou représentation, en tout ou partie, sous quelque forme et de quelque manière que ce soit, est interdite sauf accord préalable et écrit de l'éditeur, en dehors des cas prévus par la législation en vigueur en France. Il est précisé que son stockage dans une base de données est également interdit. Robert Launay Practical Joking A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s (1952a) famous paper on “The Mother’s Brother in South Africa” sparked one of the many now-forgotten debates in anthro- pology, this one about the nature and explanation of “joking relationships”. No doubt because Radcliffe-Brown was more important as a theoretician than as a field worker, and that he based his argument on ethnographic data collected by other researchers, his account of joking is pervasively abstract and, one might add, humorless. When I conducted field research among the Dyula of northern Côte-d’Ivoire1. I was indeed able, like many of my colleagues, to observe such joking first-hand. Indeed, the obscene joking aimed by worosso, slaves “born in the house”, at horon, “free persons”, seemed so discordant with Radcliffe-Brown’s explanations that I devoted my first publication to the phenomenon (Launay 1977). In retrospect, I do not think that my analysis did justice to the subject I was privy to observe. Radcliffe-Brown and other theoreticians did not ignore the obvious fact that individuals related to one another as joking partners did not, for the most part, actively joke with one another. However, in their analyses, they were all too eager to sweep the significance of this fact conveniently under the rug. This is all the more striking if one bears in mind that joking between certain categories of affines was routinely contrasted to avoidance between other categories. However, affines who were supposed to avoid one another were expected to do so consistently, while those who could joke with one another did so intermittently if at all. The episodic nature of joking in “joking relationships” is, I wish to argue, hardly incidental. Joking has constantly to be instantiated. Someone has to initiate the behavior, and others have to construe it as appropriate. Such instantiation can take quite different forms. Among the Dyula, as I shall argue, certain forms of joking are staged on ritual occasions, while others are enacted on an ad hoc basis. In neither case can joking be reduced to the mechanical application of norms or rules putatively governing social relationships. 1. In 1972-1973 and again in 1984-1985. Cahiers d’Études africaines, XLVI (4), 184, 2006, pp. 795-808. 796 ROBERT LAUNAY Joking in Theory In his remarkable ethnography Naven, Gregory Bateson (1958) analyzed ritual transvestitism among the Iatmul of New Guinea from a series of dif- ferent perspectives: the cultural premises underlying the relationship between mother’s brother and sister’s son among the Iatmul; the structural dimensions of the relationship; the contribution of the ritual to group cohe- sion; the ritual as an expression of Iatmul ethos; and the ritual as an express- ion of Iatmul modes of thought. Each explanation, taken on its own, seems to elucidate certain facets of the ritual, at the expense of leaving other aspects untouched. But these different explanations do not really articulate with one another, but rather progressively forefront and eclipse different aspects of the ritual. All told, as he admits in his epilogue to the 1958 edition, the ritual remains almost as problematic and opaque as it did at the outset of the book. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown’s classic discussions of joking relationships (1950; 1952a; 1952b; 1952c) unselfconsciously constitute a similar series of attempts to explain the phenomena in question from different vantage points which do not, in the end, quite fit together. He explains the joking relationship between mother’s brother and sister’s son among the Thonga of southern Africa in terms of the structure of affective relationships in the patriarchal family: affectionate and easygoing between a man and his mother and by extension (citing the principle of the equivalence of siblings) his mother’s brother; authoritarian and formal between a man and his father and, by extension, his father’s sister. He also analyzes joking behavior between relatives-in-law, but in a substantially different manner, where jok- ing is an alternative (rather than a polar opposite) of avoidance behavior, where each form of behavior is a means of managing and defusing potential conflict. Joking between grandparents and grandchildren is again contras- ted to the conflict characterizing relations between parents and children, an indirect expression of the alliance of both generations against the children of the grandparents and the parents of the grandchildren. In each of these instances, joking behavior is contrasted to formal and constrained modes of interaction, but in essentially dissimilar ways—as an expression of genuine affection between mother (and mother’s kin) and son; as an expression of repressed conflict with affines; or as an indirect expression of strains in the relationship between parents and children. By something of a sleight of hand, Radcliffe-Brown assimilates joking between pairs of clans or ethnic groups to affinal joking as “modes of organi- zing a definite and stable system of social behaviour in which conjunctive and disjunctive components... are maintained and combined” (1952b: 95), that is to say, as a means of managing potential conflict between distinct groups or categories. As such, they constitute one of “four modes of alliance or consociation, (1) through intermarriage, (2) by exchange of goods or services, (3) by blood-brotherhood or exchanges of names or sacra, and PRACTICAL JOKING 797 (4) by the joking relationship [that] may exist separately or combined in several different ways” (1952b: 102). The problem here is, first, that virtually all social relationships combine conjunctive and disjunctive com- ponents. However, in all the other instances, joking relationships are essen- tially constituted in counterpoint to alternatively structured relationships: mother’s brother as opposed to father’s sister; affines whom one avoids as opposed to affines with whom one jokes; grandparents and grandchildren as opposed to parents and children. Pairs of clans may joke with one another, but there are no corresponding pairs who avoid one another. To Radcliffe-Brown’s consternation, Marcel Griaule (1948), whose analysis of “L’Alliance cathartique” between the Dogon and the Bozo stres- sed its unique derivation from the specifics of Dogon cosmology, expressed considerable skepticism about the possibility of any cross-culturally valid theory which could account for such instances of “joking”. Indeed, he suggested that they might constitute so many “cérémonies à cloches”, an artificial category based on superficial resemblances, like European church ceremonies—weddings, funerals—in which there is a ringing of bells. (“Cérémonies à cloches” was perhaps not the most felicitous example; one could make a case that this was not as trivial a classification as Griaule implies. The most striking case in anthropological theory is “totemism”, a rubric which, as Goldenweiser (1910) demonstrated, encompassed a var- iety of very disparate phenomena (Lowie 1920: 137-145; Lévi-Strauss 1962). Even Radcliffe-Brown, try as he may, could only analyze different forms of joking in different terms, or alternatively formulate an explanation so broad that it hardly engaged with the specifics of each instance. The Puzzle of Senankuya Radcliffe-Brown’s various explanations, as well as subsequent analyses of instances of joking (Lévi-Strauss 1945; Harris 1968: 527-30; Launay 1977), all take as their point of departure the specific relationship characterized by joking behavior. In other words, the explanation of joking is presumably to be found in the nature of the relationship of mother’s brother to sister’son, husband’s brother to brother’s wife, grandparent to grandchild, hereditary slave to freeman, etc. But this is not invariably the case. Take, for example, the Mande practice of senankuya, one which has numerous analogies among other West African peoples as well. Senankuya is the joking relationship between different pairs of jamu, patronyms; for example, Keita and Cisse joke with one another. Each jamu has not one, but in fact several, joking partners. While the term jamu has sometimes been translated as “clan” (Launay 1972), it is essential to note that these do not in any meaningful sense of the word constitute a “group”. In any specific community, particular descent groups will be identified by their patronym: Bamba, Coulibaly, Fofana, etc.
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