'Joking' in Padhola: Categorical Relationships, Choice and Social Control

Abstract

In studying 'joking relationships' we are not just studying a particular type of behaviour, but complex social relationships, of which joking may be only one expression and which may have other more significant forms of expression. In his analysis of joking relationships Radcliffe-Brown (I952) noted that joking might take different forms; it might be verbal, include horseplay, be obscene or not. He identified different types of relationship in which joking might occur, between affines, mothers' brothers and sisters' sons, cross-cousins, grandparents and grandchildren, clans and tribes. However, he made little of the different types of behaviour included under the term 'joking' and considered them as a single type of behaviour to be explained in terms of a single type of structural situation. This structural situation he found to be one in which the individuals or groups involved are socially separate (social disjunction) but at the same time are brought together by ties of friendliness and mutual aid (social conjunction). Through joking the hostility in the relationship, resulting from social disjunction, is expressed without destroying co-operation, or social conjunction. He described joking relationships as one of four different kinds of alliance, which might be combined in different ways in any single relationship, the other three being intermarriage, exchange of goods and services, and blood brotherhood or exchange of names or sacra. He himself took his analysis of these relationships no further, being rather concerned to identify the situations in which joking occurs and to show that in these situations there is the expected conjunction and disjunction between the groups or persons in the different categories involved. Subsequent writers have sometimes preferred to stress other aspects of relationships in which joking occurs. For example, Colson (I962) analysed her material in terms of clan reciprocity rather than clanjoking, and Goody (I959) took one type of relationship in which joking occurs, that of mother's brother and sister's son in a patrilineal society, and explained the form of the relationslhip as resulting from the sister's son having residual rights in his mother's lineage. By stressing the other aspects of these relationships these writers show the differences between them and it becomes apparent that all relationships in which there is joking cannot be explained in terms of a single structural situation. Until the conference on joking relationships at Makerere College in December I966, only Mayer (I950; 195I)' had considered the joking itself in more detail. This article considers, with reference to thejopadhola in eastern Uganda, some ways in which the analysis of the joking itself might be carried further, and concludes with a discussion of the relevance of this material to comparative studies.