Abstract
Trauma has been argued to facilitate a new global humanism in anthropology, representing a turn in the discipline away from Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s ‘savage slot’ that saw other peoples as objects of difference toward a new empathetic embrace that seeks communion in suffering. This chapter examines the costs of such empathy, highlighting the reductionism involved in depicting social groups as cultures of trauma. It presents two case studies, one from Cameroon and the other from the Aegean island of Chios, to suggest that suffering need not result in trauma, but rather that our common humanity might also be found in the widespread practice of ritual laughter.
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