[Linganth] Native American Humor Roundtable Panel AAA 2016

[S.L. Snyder]

Hello everyone! I am soliciting participants for a roundtable on Native
American humor for AAA 2016. My co-organizer and I chose the roundtable
format to allow for flexible discussion and inclusion of
non-anthropologists and/or non-scholars. We are particularly welcoming of
Native comedians and writers, but encourage anyone interested in the topic
to participate. If you or someone you know would like to participate,
please contact me at sls2149 at columbia.edu. I have included the session
abstract below.

Best,

Sara L. Snyder
sls2149 at columbia.edu
PhD. Candidate, Columbia University
Music Instructor, New Kituwah Academy

___________________________________________

Co-organizers: Sara L. Snyder (PhD. candidate, Columbia) & Kristina
Jacobsen (Assistant Professor, University of New Mexico)


Roundtable Session Proposal for AAA 2016



*Discovering Native American Epistemologies and Ontologies Through Humor*


The study of humor has mostly been a side project to more “serious” matters
in Anthropology, but this roundtable session forefronts humor as a medium
by which Native American people engage with and create unique ontologies
and epistemologies. Native peoples use humor to cope with historical and
contemporary traumas, mediate social relationships and conflicts, teach
cultural values, demarcate inclusions and exclusions, decenter hegemonic
power relationships, and decolonize colonial discourses and practices.
Native humor is a “spiritual tradition” through which Native people can
heal from and cope with ruptures in their lives and person (Garret et. al
2005). A sense of humor is often understood as a particular frame of
reference for “seeing” the world and negotiating the interactions and
inconsistencies of everyday life. Laughing *with* someone generally means
laughing *at* someone else, and social boundaries of belonging can be
forged and broken through humor. A rapier Native wit can perceive and point
out social inequalities and absurdities and, like a “rhetorical Trojan
horse,” pave the way for more serious conversations to take place (Carty
and Musharbash 2008). Humorous narratives can be delivered to shame someone
in order to cause a change in behavior. They can teach younger people how
to live correctly and maintain humility and communal equality.


Due to its genesis on Native American soil, anthropology has engaged with
Native humor since its earliest days when Sapir wrote of Navajo puns in
1932. Basso’s seminal ethnography of speaking, *Portraits of “The
Whiteman,"* frames Apache humor as verbal play with the Apache cultural
symbol “The Whiteman,” where Apaches subversively impersonate the registers
and ways of speaking of their colonizers. “Play” is a pervasive metaphor
for the “cultural intimacy” of humor (Herzfeld 1997), which “projects a
perfect inner circle of play-sphere…to gauge how we read one another across
the Buckskin Curtain” (Lincoln 1993). Verbal play “unweaves” meaning, at
times *accidentally*, through the ambiguity of reference, and privileges
cultural ambiguity over structural categories (Samuels 2001), de-centering
colonial conceptualizations of the world. Such ambiguities “reinforce an
individual’s autonomy” and “act as an invitation to imaginative processes”
(Webster 2015:132), and once a person can imagine the world in a new way,
he can work towards changing it. Humor empowers Native people to walk
through the doors of potential it opens. Humor is articulated through the
sounds of verbal play but also in the silences in between, where silence
allows for *discovering *the “contradictions and incongruities that lead to
humor” (Gross 2007). Silence can mark a stand on an issue as much as a
pointed joke.


In the present, Native Humor circulates widely in a multitude of languages
and forms. Across new media and the internet, memes and cartoons and
narratives go flying around the world at the click of a button. Humor
continues to do important social work in the lives of Native people. This
panel attends to humor as method and theory, as evidence of Native ways of
knowing and being in the contemporary world.


*keywords*: humor, Native North America, American Indian, linguistic
anthropology, verbal art, voice, epistemology, ontology
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