Humor in Ethnohistory
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2739727 |
|---|---|
| Authors | James L Axtell, James Axtell (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 109 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Ethnohistory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0014-1801 • E-ISSN: 1527-5477 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/482538 |
| OpenAlex | W2324112869 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 2 |
Like a good Puritan preacher, every presidential addresser should have a text. I take mine from a character in Charles Dickens's Hard Times who once lisped, People mutht be amuthed. They can't be alwayth a learning, nor yet they can't be alwayth a working. They an't made for it. Hardworking students such as ourselves should take such sage advice to heart, especially after several long sessions of opiniatry and a full meal. So I propose to spend a blessedly few minutes considering a subject of light confection, a jeu d'esprit which also has, I hope, some serious import for practitioners of ethnohistory. My topic is humor in ethnohistory, which, I assure you, won out only after an exceedingly close race with three other subjects: morbidity in ethnohistory, the irrelevance of Derridadaism, and fieldwork among the Toyotas. But seriously, folks, consider the humorous side of ethnohistory. Since the characters of the past were fully human, they were downright funny some of the time, at least as often as we and our elected officials are. They found each other funny, and we find them funny. As historians, we also find some of their mutual predicaments funny, particularly those resulting from cultural misunderstandings. So we have at least three subjects ready for analysis and the engorgement of dissertations: what past actors found funny in each other, which necessarily involves the relative standards of their respective cultures; what we, individually and personally, find funny about the actors of the past, which involves our own culturally relative standards; and what we, as humane scholars, find funny about the situations and predicaments they got themselves into, which calls for, not an
Archaeology · Ethnohistory · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History
| Citations per year | 0.15 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2013 - 2014 (2) |
| Highly cited | No |