Joking kinship as a syncretic institution

Abstract

This article builds on empirical examination of joking kinships in a cluster of Serer villages in Senegal and among migrants in Dakar to make three points. First, joking kinship is most productively understood through pragmatist and constructivist social theory in terms of institutional syncretism, a process of disassembling institutions derived from more than one origin for the purpose of putting together new, recombinant structures. Second, framing joking kinship in terms of syncretism fundamentally destabilizes positivist efforts to use it as an independent variable to account for ethnic cooperation and nation-building. In spite of this, a limited and modified version of positivist analysis is possible in light of syncretism. Finally, institutional syncretism helps move the discussion of joking kinship away from sterile primordialist-instrumentalist and universalism-particularism debates and into a more robust political anthropology of changing understandings and diverse deployments of elements of so-called "traditional" culture.