Displacing Culture: A Joke of Significance in Urban Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Trobriand Islands of Papua New Guinea. We don't really expect to get these jokes. They issue, after all, from the land of the archetypally Other, as we know it from colonial and postcolonial ethnographies. Yet to the extent that we find the right questions to ask-questions (such as Cottom's) that allow us to enter the of their cultural significance-we stand to gain an appreciation of these jokes as historically specific ideological formations, and an appreciation also of how, as events play in the interstices of culture, joking performances come to challenge the notion of culture as a closed system of meanings. This is the problem: to show how joking significance operates, by deferral and by displacement, as a political action of self-other exchange; to show furthermore how this action has a torsional relation to cultural authorityindeed, potentially at least, is subversive of such.2 We turn, then, to the phenomenon Trobrianders label Bau jokes, beginning with three narrated texts. 1. Two Bau men and the young son of one of them set out for the day to go fishing. The men stop at the top of a cliff. The little boy complains that he is cold and his father tells him to go warm himself in the sea. Time passes and the other man wonders if the child is all right. The father goes to the water's edge, and looking down, sees the little boy floating face up under the water, the smile