Week # 7 - February 24, 2011

“Your culture or mine?” Cross-cultural humor: joking relationships. Etic and emic humor. Diversity focus: Replacing kinship joking relationship with non-kinship based relationship in the U.S.A. and creating non-institutionalized and voluntary (or is it?) group identities in the U.S. • What is cross-cultural and what is inter-cultural within American culture. • Formulating new joking relationships (e.g., employer vs employee; senior groups) in the U.S.A.

Readings for Week 7:
Apte, Mahadev L.: Joking Relationships. In Humor and Laughter. An Anthropological Approach. Cornell University Press. 1985. Pp. 29-66.
Davidheiser, Mark: Special Affinities and Conflict Resolution: West African Social Institutions and Mediation.In  Beyond Intractability. 2005-2006.
www.beyondintractability.org/essay/joking_kinship

Also review:
Polimeni, Joseph & Jeffrey P. Reiss: The First Joke: Exploring the Evolutionary Origins of Humor. In Evolutionary Psychology. Vol. 4. 2006. Pp. 347-366. 
www.human-nature.com./ep/downloads/ep04347366.pdf