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

Abstract

It was fashionable in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for anthropologists to title or subtitle their papers 'A little known people' of this or that region. In what follows, I look back at my engagement with trauma theory in my work in Cameroon and delineate my current approach to memories of violence in the Aegean island of Chios where I now work. I suggest that we can keep hold of the pan-humanist ideal in recent anthropology that Robbins defends without relinquishing the critical focus on cultural difference that he is also at pains to defend. It is our research participants who have shown us how to do this without any need for the cultural agent orange of trauma theory, which desiccates everything it touches in its unreflexive production of universal victimhood and its monochrome histories of the vanquished. In thrall to suffering and terror, we have ignored the social power of ritual laughter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)