Moving beyond the truism that laughter is the best medicine, this article integrates multiple linguistic anthropological models of humor to theorize why joking is so often used to address issues at or beyond the boundaries of what is considered acceptable to talk about in most other contexts. The article analyzes joking about HIV among members of a Zulu gospel choir who are living with HIV/AIDS in South Africa, identifying the precise linguistic features that choir members used in dealing with stigma by means of joking interactions. Three properties of joking about HIV are discussed, and it is suggested that these properties may operate cross‐culturally in other genres of humor in which individuals approach topics that are shameful, embarrassing, upsetting or taboo. Utilizing anthropological perspectives on genre, poetics, and play, this article discusses linguistic properties of joking that make it ideal for constructing and contesting support amid stigma. [humor, stigma, verbal art, joking, HIV/AIDS in South Africa]

No abstract

This article is positioned at the intersection of linguistic, medical, and psychological anthropology and reviews scholarship on the communicative processes that constitute moral/ethical care. Varying notions of care have become a leitmotif in efforts to include the analysis of agency and creativity in discussions of the lived experience of marginalization. Understandings of care have in common an emphasis on relationality and activity: Communicative activities of care both constitute and are made relevant by morally/ethically framed relationships with others and oneself. Embodied communication is central in both care activities and the constitution of moral/ethical care. From a phenomenological standpoint, communicative activities of care are simultaneously social action and embodied experience. This article reviews three key themes: ( a) the embodied linguistic constitution of care, ( b) the performance of care, and ( c) exclusion from care. Together, these themes reveal common moral/ethical–aesthetic processes that are shared across diverse social and cultural contexts.

This article synthesizes anthropological research on morality and performance, drawing from ethnographic fieldwork with a Zulu choir that was an HIV support group and AIDS activist organization. The article responds to an increasing level of anthropological interest in the topic of morality and contributes to an emerging body of literature on language and experience. The concept of moral assemblages is used to examine the embodied communicative dispositions of choir members amid two overlapping and sometimes conflicting public discourses about HIV disclosure. Building on previous research on how performance makes it possible to address topics otherwise outside cultural boundaries of acceptable speech, the article explores how framing HIV disclosure as performance allowed some South Africans living with HIV to embody the conflicting prescriptions of two distinct public discourses about disclosure. [Morality, embodiment, performance, HIV/AIDS, South Africa, disclosure]

No abstract