Laughter Without Borders: Embodied Memory, and Pan-Humanism in a Post-Traumatic Age

Africa Starts at the Pyrenees: Humor, Laughter, and Financial Recession in a Spanish Enclave in Morocco

“…Where does this leave us in relation to anthropological attempts to guide and inform protest movements? As Argenti (2016) has observed occurring on the island of Chios and in the kingdom of Oku, when faced with a storm that has collapsed life-trajectories and national narratives, stranded them in the enclave, or scattered them across Spanish territory, the inhabitants of Ceuta have explored responses other than just keeping calm and holding on for dear life. They weaved the experiences of trauma into creative texts that provide hilarious explanations to infuriating contradictions and turn the horrifying agents of power into ridiculous objects that can be overcome by laughter.…”

“…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…”

“…Indeed, in both Cameroon and Greece, the perpetrators (demons, spirits, pirates, politicians) and memories of trauma (death of a king, pirate raids, recession) become "entextualized" (Barber 2007:22) in masks, caricatures, and carnival floats. In doing so, these terrifying forces are "degraded" into objects of caricature and ridicule that can be (mis)handled and destroyed by the laughter of communities they festively bring together (Argenti 2016). This article tests this model of a liberating, regenerative laughter against the Ceutan case.…”

Introduction: The Presence of the Past in the Era of the Nation-State

“…Because the majority of studies of collective memory in recent years have been studies of political violence, social scientists-influenced by literary theorists-have turned to science and sought to highlight the particular forms of suffering engendered by war with reference to the psychological category of trauma and the psychiatric symptomatology of post-traumatic stress disorder. 6 Leaving aside the problem of universalization and the consequent erasure of context and history implicit in the trauma discourse (Argenti 2007(Argenti , 2016Argenti and Schramm 2010;Broch-Due 2016;Fassin and Rechtman 2009;Hacking 1995;Lewis 2013;Leys 2000;Young 1995), the key point for our current discussion is that trauma is said to break the linearity of psychic time, introducing to it a circularity or short circuit that is the root of the morbidity of the syndrome. The role of the therapist is to interrupt this circularity and to reestablish the linear continuity of psychic time, making of the past a past and of the present an unambiguously monolithic, synchronous moment not haunted by any ghosts.…”