Irony and joking in ethnographic fieldwork: Reflections from Santo Antão Island (Cape Verde)
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1981
In questo saggio tratto del ruolo cruciale dell’ironia e dello scherzo nell’antropologia, focalizzando l’attenzione sulla relazione etnografica. La mia analisi fa riferimento a una ricerca sul campo da me effettuata dal 2001 al 2004 a Ponta do Sol, nell'isola di Santo Antão (Capo Verde). Nelle pratiche capoverdiane lo scherzo e l’ironia rappresentano modalità comunicative consolidate e strumenti importanti per costruire e rinsaldare i rapporti sociali: strumenti per raggiungere l'"intimità culturale" necessaria per includere i nuovi arrivati nella "comunità" e nello stesso tempo per gestire le ambiguità. In effetti, è proprio attraverso l'ironia che i miei interlocutori sono stati in grado di cogliere perfettamente la mia posizione ambigua di insider/outsider. In questo contesto etnografico specifico, il rapporto ironico è inteso sia come strumento di comunicazione fondamentale per l'incontro etnografico sia come un insolito, in quanto sempre incompleto e irrisolto, rito di passaggio: anche se gli stranieri/antropologi possono essere accettati solo se diventano in una certa misura capoverdiani, in realtà non sono mai davvero in grado di completare questo passaggio. Il saggio esamina brevemente l’ironia e lo scherzo in antropologia e si concentra su aspetti delle interazioni ironiche a Capo Verde che sono collegati alle relazioni interculturali nel contesto etnografico, considerato come luogo di comunicazione incerta. Sottolineo come, soprattutto in contesti interculturali, l'ambiguità dell'ironia non rappresenti un ostacolo alla comunicazione, ma piuttosto un elemento chiave di comprensione tra antropologi e informatori, nonché un significativo dispositivo euristico. 
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Martina Giuffrè
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Irony and joking in ethnographic fieldwork: Reflections from Santo Antão Island (Cape Verde)
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Martina Giuffrè
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Irony and joking in ethnographic fieldwork: Reflections from Santo Antão Island (Cape Verde)
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                                          2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240




Irony and joking in ethnographic fieldwork: Reflections from
Santo Antão Island (Cape Verde)
Martina GIUFFRÈ
Università di Sassari


ABSTRACT: In this essay I address the crucial role of irony and joking in anthropology with a
focus on the ethnographic relationship. My starting point is field research carried out from
2001 to 2004 on Santo Antão island (Cape Verde), specifically Ponta do Sol. In Cape Ver-
dean practice, jokes and irony represent customary communicational modes and important
tools for building relationships: the ultimate means of achieving “cultural intimacy”, they
are used almost as rites of initiation to bring newcomers into the community and at the
same time to manage ambiguities. Indeed, it was precisely through irony that my inter-
locutors were able to perfectly capture my ambiguous insider/outsider position. In this spe-
cific ethnographic context, the ironic relationship is understood as both a key communica-
tion tool in the ethnographic encounter and an unusual rite of passage: although
strangers/anthropologists can only be accepted if they become Cape Verdean to some de-
gree, in reality they are never really able to complete this passage. The essay briefly reviews
irony and joking in anthropology and focuses on aspects of ironic interactions in Cape
Verde that are linked to intercultural relations in the ethnographic context as a site of uncer-
tain communication. I stress how, especially in intercultural contexts, the ambiguity of irony
represents not a barrier to communication but rather a key element of understanding
between anthropologists and informants as well as a significant heuristic device.

KEYWORDS: IRONY, JOKING, ETHNOGRAPHIC ENCOUNTER, RITE OF PASSAGE, CAPE VERDE.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Martina Giuffrè
IIrony and joking in ethnographic fieldwork: Reflections from Santo Antão Island (Cape Verde)
2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1981
MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                                   214




Introduction
    For several decades now scholars have characterized the contemporary moment
as the “age (or culture) of irony” and identified irony as the main cultural character-
istic of the entire postmodern condition (see Fernandez, Huber 2001) 1. As Friedrich
has noted, irony is always with us, implicated in the nature of power and time, cul-
ture and language, tropes and tragedy (Friedrich 2001). In this essay I address the
crucial role of irony, humour and joking in the ethnographic relationship.
    After a brief overview of irony and joking in anthropology, I focus on specific as-
pects of ironic relationships and joking in Cape Verde that are linked to intercultur-
al relations in the ethnographic context, understood in this case as a site of uncertain
communication. My aim is to stress the fact that, especially in intercultural contexts,
the ambiguity implied in ironic relationships does not represent a barrier to commu-
nication; rather, it constitutes a key element of understanding between anthropolo-
gists and informants as well as a significant heuristic device. My starting point is
field research I carried out from 2001 to 2004 on the island of Santo Antão (Cape
Verde) and specifically Ponta do Sol, a small fishing town on the extreme western tip
of the island of Santo Antão in the Cape Verdean archipelago. The archipelago con-
sists of ten islands divided into the southern, Sottovento, and northern, Sopravento
groups. The islands were uninhabited until the 15th century, at which point Por-
tuguese colonization transformed them into an outpost for African slaves coming
mainly from West Africa. As a result, the archipelago quickly became an important
intermediate stopover in the slave trade between Africa and South America. Cape
Verde later gained independence in 1975.
    Santo Antão has a population of 47,000 people and an economy based mainly on
fishing and agriculture, in particular the cultivation of corn, sugar cane, bananas,
manioca and beans. In recent years tourism has become increasingly important and,
last but not least, migrants’ remittances also represent an important component of is-
landers’ income. Today many Cape Verdeans work in commercial and tourist sec-
tors as well as the service industry.

1. I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for the invaluable suggestions they provided. Their
reviews helped me to improve this article, granting me the opportunity to radically rethink it: in par-
ticular, they suggested I enrich the ethnographic component and address the crucial question of how,
as an anthropologist, I could ever be sure I had understood local forms of irony without the possibil-
ity of misunderstandings. At the same time they invited me to more fully develop the idea that the
process of understanding local practices of irony might be described through reference to the notion
of rite of passage.


                                           2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240
IRONY AND JOKING IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK                                           215


    The main focus of my research was gender relationships and intergenerational
challenges. During my three years of fieldwork I had the time to mix with com-
munity members, visit their houses, participate in their familial lives, attend parties
and other formal or informal gatherings, make friends with the women and learn
Creole (Giuffrè 2007). My long stay in Cape Verde allowed me to become deeply
involved in the life of the community. Further, I was living with a Cape Verdean
partner in that period, which had the effect of inserting me directly into a web of
family relationships while at the same time placing me in a very ambiguous position,
as I will describe. I immersed myself in this experience as someone who feels a ‘res-
onance’ with the other, in Wikan’s terms (1992). The resonance Wikan speaks of is
not something mystical but rather an element of anthropological practice; based on
practical attitudes and embedded in concrete behaviour, it represents a way of shar-
ing the world with Others (Fabietti 2005; Piasere 2002). Therefore, I consider it ex-
tremely important that laughter, humour and irony be included as key elements in
sharing the emotions that are part of ethnographic practice. During this period of
fieldwork I carried out more than 100 qualitative interviews with men and women of
different social classes, ages and lifestyle groups. I also collected four life histories
from women of different generations and carried out participant observation at
many social occasions, such as festivities and informal meetings. I developed dialo-
gical relationships and approaches with the people I interviewed. This text is based
on my interpretation of these data.
    In Cape Verdean practice, jokes and irony represent customary modes of com-
munication and important tools for building relationships and testing newcomers to
see if they should be brought into the community. The importance of these practices
lies in the fact that they constitute the ultimate means of achieving “cultural intim-
acy” in the sense developed by Herzfeld, that is, “the recognition of those aspects of
a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that
nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance of common sociality” (2005: 3);
in other words, joking and irony both provide the unwritten rules of acceptable be-
haviour and generate a feeling of complicity. At the same time, it was precisely
through irony that the Ponta do Sol residents with whom I interacted perfectly cap-
tured the ambiguous insider/outsider position I occupied as an anthropologist.
    In this specific ethnographic context, I understand the ironic relationship as a key
communication tool in the ethnographic encounter and a specific and unusual type
of rite of passage that the stranger/anthropologist, who to some degree is expected
to become Cape Verdean in order to gain acceptance, must undergo but can never
really complete.




                                     2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240
MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                                    216


Irony and anthropology
    As George Marcus has argued, irony2 tends to develop more under certain histor-
ical conditions; historically, these conditions were provided by colonialism, currently
they are provided by globalization. In particular, the crises of the macro-narrative
and representation have provided a powerful impetus for the development of irony.
As Marcus states, “the basic condition that stimulates the widespread predicament
of irony is an awareness of existential doubleness, deriving from a sense of being
here with major present transformations ongoing that are intimately tied to things
happening simultaneously elsewhere but without certainty or authoritative represent-
ations of what the connections are” (Marcus 2001: 211).
    There is great deal of literature available 3 on humour and jokes (Sarnelli 2000),
but in this context I will address only the literature most relevant to my research fo-
cus. In many publications, scholars have argued that irony is related to risk (specific-
ally, that laughter is actually provoked by the presence of risk) and explored laughter
as a way of releasing or regulating tension in ambiguous situations. Studies have also
investigated how laughter can become a language of power or, on the contrary, a
symbolic tool for opposing the exercise of power4, a “weapon of the weak” “provid-
ing space for subordinated persons to voice resistance, imagine alternatives, build
community, and mobilize for better times” (Scott 1985: 17) under conditions of
political inequality such as those inherited from colonial systems, as can be seen in
the case of Cape Verde. In this way irony can contribute to building relations of
solidarity among the weak. Anthropological studies have also highlighted some im-
portant characteristics of humour and ironic relationships, finding that they are poly-
semic, historically and culturally driven, and vary not only between different inter-


2. I use the term irony in its broadest sense, that is, including both performative and linguistic as-
pects.
3. For an in-depth overview of anthropological approaches to joking, laughter and irony see Sarnelli
2000.
4. This can be seen for instance Orbldik’s case study (1942) concerning intercultural humor in
Czechoslovakia at the time of Nazi occupation, during which humor became a precious resource for
strengthening internal cohesion and a symbolic weapon that, in the end, made it acceptable “to lose
one’s life for laughing”. While taking into account critical interrogations of both a “totalizing vision
of societies” and the ascription of agency and resistance (Steinmüller 2013), and noting that we must
face the fact that social realities are permeated with ambiguity and continuous negotiations, in some
cases irony can be seen as a form of resistance, a tool for encompassing and controlling ambiguity,
and such renegotiations as a “valuable resource for inciting the moral and political imagination
against whatever is given, assumed, or imposed” (Fernandez, Huber 2001: 1). Indeed, people can use
irony in situations of unequal power to provide “an alternative reading of a situation, while evading
the challenge of direct dissent and protecting themselves from censorious response” (ibidem: 5). On
this issue see also Sarnelli 2002; Zerilli 2003; Aime 2010; Giuffrè 2007, 2014.


                                           2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240
IRONY AND JOKING IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK                                                           217


cultural settings but also within a single culture 5. Moreover, as Geertz highlights,
ethnographic research is ironic in and of itself due to the fiction of fieldwork, which
is never completely convincing to any of the participants involved; indeed, there is
always a moral tension and ethical ambiguity in the encounter between anthropolo-
gist and informant (see Imbriani 2014; Geertz 2001). As Imbriani notes, Geertz
uses the phrase anthropological irony to refer to
       […] the gap between the expectations, desires, knowledge, strategies, and feelings of
       the characters that play out in the ethnographic scene: this distance is sometimes evid-
       ent, sometimes latent, and it drives people to act “as if,” in keeping with the game,
       managing discomfort or misunderstanding whether they like it or not, or giving in (as
       sometimes happens) to refusal and the urge to escape (2014: 3)6.

   In this sense, the various social actors involved in the ethnographic encounter al-
most always end up defining it differently and misunderstandings are to be expected,
even regarding the figure of the anthropologist him/herself (see also Imbriani 2014).
   Moreover, as Steinmüller has noted in reference to Rorty’s idea of ironic re-
description
       one might reach deeper layers of shared knowledge that are based not on abstract
       definitions, but on shared experience […] everyday talk and everyday action are often
       uneigentlich, they are not “literal” in the sense that they have a single interpretation, a
       single possible re-description. Such an interpretation of irony implies that it is not
       “merely” rhetorical (2013: 11).

   This conceptualization of irony is developed in two important volumes: Irony in
Action (Fernandez, Huber 2001) and Illness and Irony (Lambek 2004).
   The highly significant Irony in Action, one of the first comprehensive anthropolo-
gical publications on the subject, analyses irony not only as a feature of methodolo-
gical concerns but also as an object of anthropological inquiry. As the authors un-
derline, anthropology can be seen as an ironic discipline that uses the process of es-
trangement to offer alternative perspectives, thereby making “the strange familiar
and the familiar strange” (Fernandez, Huber 2001).
   In the second publication, Lambek (2004) distinguishes between rhetorical irony
and situational irony and emphasizes that anthropologists often take both situations
and the statements of their interlocutors too literally, as if ordinary people could not
access the relativistic and doubtful perspective that is the privilege of intellectuals.


5. It is important to highlight the internal cultural dimension alongside the intercultural one. Further-
more, historical trends should also be taken into consideration: according to Abbot (1979), fear of
ridicule has diminished since the sixties and today self-mocking is a positive and socially accepted
behavior (see Sarnelli 2000).
6. Translation mine.


                                            2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240
MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                               218


Steinmüller’s proposed concept of “everyday ethics” helps make sense of this phe-
nomenon: the way people deal with such situations depends heavily on the contin-
gent circumstances of the everyday. In his research in China, Steinmüller, following
Rorty’s perspective, focuses on the “décalage between different moral frameworks
and contingent situations […] as an exploration of all the different ways in cui these
opposites meet each other: in confrontation, irony and (mis) representations” (2013:
12). This approach of casting the anthropological encounter as deeply ironic in and
of itself provides the framework for my approach in this essay. I would argue that
irony remains a relatively under-explored issue in anthropology and that it is very
important to pay attention to irony, joking and humour in ethnographic fieldwork as
a local resource for gaining insight into local life ways7.
    Irony, joking and the act of making fun of others play an important role in en-
counters between cultures in that they make it possible to express differences while
simultaneously helping to defuse them, allowing these encounters to succeed pre-
cisely in that the characteristics of “insincerity, hypocrisy and self-deceit” are clear
to those involved (La Cecla 2003). Joking is a deterrent to tension as well as a tool
to “dramatize and smooth out closeness and allow us to put our identities at risk” in
a way that is reciprocal and calculated. Making fun of others works to render the
contours of intrusiveness broader and clearer: the Other encroaches, but under con-
trolled conditions (ibidem: 97).
    In his study of the local market in Naples, Sarnelli highlights how important it is
for the social actors who frequent the market to know how to “play the game” and
describes how the Senegalese immigrant vendors use joking relationships as a stra-
tegic means of pursuading Neapolitans traders to include them; indeed, their beha-
viour represents a playful way of becoming “a bit Neapolitan”8. Sarnelli notes that
the Neapolitans traders only allowed those Senegalese who maintained ongoing jok-
ing relationships to set up a fixed position in the market. Otherness in this sense is
encoded as a game that becomes a symbolic strategy of territorial control (Sarnelli
2002). As Fernandez and Huber state, “irony is a questioning of established categor-
ies of inclusion and exclusion, and the ironizer is he or she or that group who has
been detrimentally categorized, and bound thereby to contest through irony the ad-
equacy of such categories” (2001: 9).

7. “Many ethnographies have been insensitive to irony although much of cultural anthropology and
sociolinguistic centers on experience marked by the kinds of flux and gaps and discontinuities that
are so often called ‘ironic’ […]” (Fernandez, Huber 2001: 29-30).
8. The game often consists in a ritual exchange of insults in a strong spirit of competitiveness in
which the winner is the one who has the last word and the most support from the bystanders. The
most popular of these jokes includes a fake theft or seizure of goods held by a Senegalese person,
carried out by a fake policeman, or the attempt by Senegalese vendors to scare the Neapolitans by
making sudden, loud noises, such as by kicking a box of fruit.


                                         2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240
IRONY AND JOKING IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK                                                         219


   For those coming from outside, such as immigrants or, in my case, the anthropo-
logist, there is even more effort involved in reorienting cognitive maps and taking on
new codes of reference. Often the encounter leads to cultural misunderstandings and
confusion. This is disorienting but inevitable.
   As Steinmüller points out in reference to his research in China
       these ambiguities appear particularly salient when people are confronted with an out-
       sider who wants to enquire precisely about such things. Covertness, embarrassment,
       cynicism, and irony are communicative strategies that make it possible to acknowledge
       both sides of the contradiction, to avoid confrontation, and to maintain communication
       (Steinmüller 2013: 22).

   During fieldwork, the anthropologist
       is forced to recognize the ironies of his own attempts to empathize with others and ul-
       timately of his trade as a “professional” observer and writer, and even of his own exist-
       ence. If ethnography can include ironies of re-description in Rorty’s sense, the experi-
       ence of fieldwork invariably includes irony of embarrassment in Herzfeld’s sense.
       Irony always cuts both ways, and as such it has an equally unsettling potential for the
       participant observer (ibidem: 229).

   Indeed, if anthropologists hope to empathize with the people and groups they in-
teract with, they must understand the jokes these actors perform. This understand-
ing can only be attained through “impregnating research,” that is to say research in
which the anthropologist incorporates ethnographic experience 9 by “living-with” the
research participants. It is this research approach that leads to knowing “what people
laugh at”. “Laughing with” people is perhaps one of the most powerful devices for
achieving inclusion in another “culture”.

The pervasiveness of irony on Santo Antão island
   In Cape Verdean Creole, irony is called “ironiâ” o “runiâ”, a term derived from
the Portuguese. Irony is present in all spheres of social life and joking is the most
common mode of interaction between people.
   The people of Ponta do Sol frequently use the term “brinkadeira”, which covers
not only ironic jokes and teasing but also gestures and behaviour such as pinching


9. In his essay Etnografia come esperienza, the anthropologist Piasere (2013) relates a very meaning-
ful story about this issue: during a conference of anthropologists, one anthropologist told a funny
anecdote related to his long experience among the Roma. The only audience members who laughed
were those who had likewise spent extended periods among the Roma, as they were the only listeners
capable of understanding what really constitutes a humorous situation according to the Roma.



                                           2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240
MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                     220


someone’s bottom, making facial expressions, making movements of a sexual nature
and performing particular types of dance. In discussions carried out during meetings
at my interlocutors’ homes, locals often expressed the importance of a relational
mode involving reciprocal ironically bantering and addressed the topic of “what we
laugh at”. It was clear that irony was the yardstick of inclusion and sharing even in
situations involving foreigners, despite the fact that such outsiders were unable to un-
derstand the shared irony. While managing a pub/restaurant together with my Cape
Verdean partner, I repeatedly observed joking or teasing directed at the tourists,
who were automatically excluded from the group “us Ponta do Sol locals”.
    During my time on the island, many of my friends reminded me that people who
do not know how to joke will never get along in Cape Verde. Whenever I was upset
by something, people pointed out that, on Santo Antão, you have to know how to
engage in “brinkadeira”.
    Even my partner occasionally criticized me, especially in the early part of my
stay in Ponta do Sol, teasingly informing me that “Bo è muito suscetível…” (“you
are too sensitive”) and explaining that the community took a negative view of being
touchy, of not knowing how to joke and make fun of oneself.
    Brinkadeira is an essential element of community life: individuals are expected to
laugh and joke at every opportunity. On one occasion Rosenda, a young women
from Ponta do Sol, explained to me that she and her best friend got along because:
“ela gosta de brinkar comigo”10. Often, the quality of knowing how to perform brin-
kadeira was taken into account in evaluating people. A ‘good person’ was often a
person who “gosta de brinkar”.
    In the case of Santo Antão island, irony and joking actually seem to represent a
form of resistance to the power imbalances or unequal relationships (based on social
class, skin colour, gender, etc.) inherited in part from Portuguese colonialism. This
resistance takes the form of both excluding/defending against that which is external
to the community and exorcising stereotypes. One of the topics that figures most
frequently in people’s joking, for example, is that of skin colour. Given that Cape
Verde is a post-colonial nation-state with a Creole population composed of very
different physical types, the issue of skin colour is highly sensitive. Locals often use
humour to engage with this sensitive subject, for instance by joking about the black-
ness of individuals. On many occasions during my stay in Cape Verde I heard
people making fun of one another’s skin colour or witnessed adults tease children in
this way. For instance, my Cape Verdean partner used to tease the little boy he was



10. “She likes to joke with me”.


                                     2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240
IRONY AND JOKING IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK                                                        221


fathering at the time11 by saying: “ma bo è preto, bo è feio, feio!”12. I even observed
some men joking with their partners about their subordinate female roles, as my
friend Djon used to do with his wife Ernestina, thereby almost flattening social and
gender differences while at the same time reiterating them. On other occasions local
people used joking to assert counter-stereotypes about non-Cape-Verdeans. Several
times, for example, people laughingly told me that white people are all the same and
that it is hard to tell them apart, the same stereotype that is often applied to black
people by whites13. Alternately, people jokingly turned to me, laughing, and told me
“you’re good even though you’re white!” In this way people speak playfully about is-
sues that are thorny or awkward for the community such as social differences,
gender and power disparities, seeking to deal with them through joking14.
    As I have mentioned, the three years I spent living in Santo Antão and develop-
ing intimacy with Cape Verdean people allowed me to gain an (at least partial) un-
derstanding of their humor and ways of joking through an “impregnating” approach.
And yet how can anthropologists be absolutely sure the pictures they develop are ac-
curate and not based on misunderstanding? Beyond the impressions they form and
the feedback they receive from interlocutors, how to ascertain that they have truly
understood the irony of another culture? Notwithstanding the inevitable possibility
of error, there were multiple clues that led me to be reasonably sure I had under-
stood the local form of irony. Irony may express the opposite of what the person re -
ally means to say, but it is not difficult to distinguish from the context and the per -
son’s attitude whether the statement is meant literally or ironically. For example, as
in the instance I describe below in which one of my main interlocutors laughingly
told me that I, poor thing, had no one to help me at home, she knew perfectly well
her statement was untrue because it was her own niece I had hired to help me with
the cleaning. Recognizing irony and joking is not simply a matter of distinguishing
the literal meaning from the metaphorical element that is often part of an ironic ex-


11. In Cape Verde there is a widespread practice called pais de criacão, a sort of fostering in which
individuals (often wealthy) raise the children of the poorest families, though they are often not kin
related (Giuffrè 2007).
12. I have left some significant expression in Creole, providing the translation in footnotes. Here:
“You are black, you are very ugly!”
13. There are white Cape Verdeans, but of course these locals are not part of the intended meaning
of “white people” in this case.
14. Sometimes joking together serves to nullify differences in status and belonging. Aime describes a
similar situation in Timbuktu, where teasing, irony and insult among the konday (spontaneous forms
of associations), even those of different ethnicities, is used to produce equality, build relationships
and deal with diversity, providing a vision of democratic society in a strongly hierarchical setting
(Aime 2010). See also Gates 1988.


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MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                     222


pression. Sometimes, in fact, the literal meaning coexists with its opposite, as in the
example described above of patting a beautiful dark-skinned child while saying “bò
è preto preto, feio feio”: the statement refers to an actual feature (blackness) but in
the form of a stereotype, and the speaker goes on to overturn the negative connota-
tions of the sterotype through an ironically affectionate statement that reverses the
literal meaning of the words. Furthermore, verbal communication is accompanied
by non-verbal forms of communication such as facial expressions, body movements
and tones of voice that one cannot help but recognize after having spent so much
time with the speaker. Indeed, it was this set of signs I interpreted to understand, for
example, that when people told me I was pale, while not actually asserting a false-
hood, they were good-naturedly making fun of me by assigning me a counter-
stereotype.
    Moreover, the most important evidence that I had understood local irony was the
fact that my communication was “successful” and I was included: beyond the misun-
derstandings and ambiguity associated with my position, the locals recognized me as
one who understood and knew how to participate in “brincadeira”, unlike tourists or
other outsiders. This understanding was demonstrated by the fact that I was in tune
with others and not disoriented at the end of a satirical joke as well as the fact that
Ponta do Sol locals themselves told me that I was a white person with whom they
were able to joke and who understood their humour, partaking in the cultural inti-
macy I mentioned earlier. Therefore, it was locals who asserted that I too was a little
bit Cape Verdean in that I was able to understand their way of joking and “gosto de
brincar”, which would not have occurred if I had not understood their practices of
irony.

Irony as a rite of passage
    As an anthropologist, the process of becoming part of the community I was
studying came to constitute a rite of passage (separation, margin or limen, and ag-
gregation) in the sense posited by Turner. According to Turner, ironic relationships
are a ritualized form of “social drama” in which laughter not only plays a regulating
function but also represents a “liminal” moment, that is to say, a moment of creative
potential that serves to generate new relationships and an agent of change that gives
rise to new forms of identity.
    I would argue that, in my case, playful and ironic interactions were a liminal mo-
ment in a rite of passage in which I went from being a foreign, white outsider to be-
ing a half-Cape Verdean insider/outsider. In his theory, Turner attributes strong sig-
nificance to conflict and crisis within the rite of passage: he sees the liminoid stage
as a highly creative moment that often gives rise to new situations and ways of be-


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ing. Thus, in the transition from foreign to almost-Cape Verdean, I passed through
all the phases of a classic rite of passage. To illustrate this shift, I draw on my field
notes and an interview I conducted with Maria Giulia, a 73-year-old woman who ac-
ted as one of my principal intermediaries and recounted her life story for me. In this
interview, I asked Maria Giulia to provide feedback on our past three years of doing
research together. The interview took place on my veranda and, as we will see,
Maria Giulia immediately began joking about my role as an anthropologist.

   Separation and the danger of that which is outside
    In the first phase, which could be defined as “separation,” people mainly kept me
at a distance. Even though I was the partner of a Cape Verdean man from the very
beginning, others treated me with formal courtesy while largely ignoring me.
    It took quite a while for the people of Ponta do Sol to begin considering me par-
tially one of them. At first, people looked at me and giggled but did not speak to me.
Often groups of locals joined in laughing at me but, when they observed my expres-
sions and saw that I was not laughing along, they mainly avoided me.
    The first three months I felt very isolated because, although I was able to under-
stand the basics of Creole, the fact that I did not understand how to joke with
people meant that most locals preferred to avoid me. The only people who did speak
to me were a few local women, such as Ernestina, who went on to become one of
my main interlocutors.
    Moreover, coming from Italy, I was in effect a representative of Terra Longe15,
the Outside, which is seen as a threat and agent of contamination: as Ernestina told
me, people are not supposed to talk to strangers from that outside world. Ernestina
did not want to be seen talking with foreigners because such interaction would have
been viewed negatively; she often sought to speak to them secretly, but never pub-
licly.
    The ambiguity of the Terra Longe clearly emerges in the imagination of the
people of Santo Antão. One particularly significant example of this is the version of
the story A historia do cavalo de perna quebrada16 that my interlocutor Bibia re-
counted for me. This story relates the adventures of a boy whose horse has a broken
leg. He goes to the Terra Longe, where “tem gente gentio, gente gentio estava comer
gente” (ivi)17 and, after having a series of adventures, returns a victorious hero. The
Terra Longe is thus depicted as a place full of dangers and monstrous people, and an

15. Meaning literally “The Far Land”, this term is used to refer to the outside world.
16. “Thea story of the horse with the broken leg”.
17. The little horse with the broken leg would take him to the Terra Longe, in the Terra Longe there
are “savage people and savage people eat other people”.


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MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                                   224


individual who travels to the Terra Longe is seen as a kind of hero who has under-
gone a rite of passage and returned victorious18.
    The figure of the Terra Longe inhabited by gente gentio is a recurring theme in
Cape Verdean literature and traditional tales (see also Bettencourt 2001) and refers
both to people who come from other places and those who exist outside established
conventions and standards. For example, in Famintos by Luis Romano, Fina Cand-
inha goes crazy following the loss of her child, and because of her madness she be-
comes a “beast of Terra Longe” […] “and the Terra Longe is full of wild people”
(1983: 236). This idea of the outside world as ambiguous and extremely dangerous
is a also recurring feature of the villains in Cape Verdean traditional tales and popu-
lar imagination, such as bruxa19 or massong20,who are always identified as coming
from outside; in the case of spirits or mysterious forces, the evil element is de-
scribed as originating in another world, an imagined elsewhere.
    Locals who have remained on the island even view migrants living in the Terra
Longe as deeply contaminated, for better or worse. The migrant, by constituting a
link with the outside and embodying the transition between here and elsewhere, be-
comes a deeply ambiguous figure for those who remain, an insider/outsider who is
necessary yet dangerous, admired and envied yet frequently judged and criticized
(Giuffrè 2007). Significantly, locals use irony to emphasize the insider/outsider
status of returning migrants.
    One example of this is the ironic nicknames attributed to returning migrants by
those who have remained in Cape Verde: women who have migrated to Italy are
called Fiat, as in “Here comes the Fiat” to indicate the large number of returning
migrants (Fiat is the make of car most widely sold in Cape Verde), or the name of a
fruit that ends up rotting on the ground because the tree had produced too much of
it.
    This theme of the ambiguous relationship between those who leave and those
who remain is also apparent in the verses of Cape Verdean mornas; for example, the
following verses make fun of women living in Lisbon who return for vacation and
ostentatiously walk around in way that is perceived to be proud and pretentious: “seu


18. The Outside represents both danger and added power, even in the sense of prestige, a new sym-
bolic force that is acquired at the same moment that the individual is “contaminated”; for this reason,
those who remain (stay behind) attribute great power to those who succeed in dominating the outside
world and return victorious, as “heroes”, from Terra Longe. A variation on the theme of “gente gen-
tia que come gente” as a lullaby for children is reported by Sobrero (1998: 295).
19. Literally “witch”.
20. In Cape Verde the massongos were mainly traders and large landowners who belonged to a secret
society predominantly male; those who attended, were believed to have made a pact with the devil by
selling his soul in exchange for power and wealth.


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andar ta spincá/ que se manera ingraçadinha/ el ta mute vaidozinha”21.
    The anthropologist Rodrigues (1994) has observed that these verses express criti-
cism of those who return and display a sense of superiority (“Jà’l bem de stranger/
jà’l gastà se d’nher/ Jà’l bem inganà es coitadà”)22; other verses describe how Cape
Verdean immigrants to the Netherlands, on returning home, show off their acquired
wealth and exude presumption and entitlement, even though other Cape Verdeans
see them as foreigners. Furthermore, those who remain at home refer to returned
migrants with nicknames such as “Dutch” or “American”; these nicknames express
ambiguity in that, in terms of social representation, they emphasize the idea that mi-
grants “have become Other”. At the same time, they also indicate recognition of the
success migrants’ have achieved through their migration and the fact that the mi-
grant is still part of the community, perceived as “a concrete and limited holos”
(ivi).
    These phenomena contributed to my being viewed with suspicion as a result of
the fact that I came from the outside world; furthermore, in my case there was also a
misunderstanding that exacerbated the situation. My first intermediary was a woman
named Lucia who worked as a maid in Rome. When she accompanied me on my
first trip to Cape Verde and introduced me to the community, she told everyone that
I was a journalist because she thought it would grant me greater importance. In real-
ity, however, this false information contributed to my exclusion. People feared me,
imaging that if they talked to me I might report what they had said on television or
in the newspapers. It took me several months to convince people that I was not a
journalist. There were a few individuals who supported me in this early period, in-
cluding Lucia and Ernestina, who enjoyed speaking with foreigners. In the end, they
served as mediators between the outside and inside and doubtlessly provided me
with crucial support and assistance. However, the Cape Verdean who really provided
me the “key” to inclusion in the community turned out to be Maria Giulia. During
our daily visits, she taught me the day-to-day importance of irony and joking while
at the same time repeatedly testing me. In so doing, she acted as both a research
aide and the real officiant of my particular rite of passage. Another person who in-
troduced me to “brinkadeira” was my partner. The crucial factor in my understand-
ing the key to inclusion was not the status I acquired by living with him so much as
the way he helped me understand joking practices.




21. “Her superb walking, with her graceful manner, she become so vain”.
22. “Already came from abroad/ came to squander his money/ come to deceive them, poor them”.


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MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                       226


   The liminal phase: challenges to overcome
    During this initial period I was therefore excluded by the community and gener-
ally felt like a cabongas23. Even though I went to the pub with my partner or was in-
vited to celebrations or people’s homes thanks to my intermediary Lucia, nobody
offered me a closer, more intimate form of relationship. At one point, however,
people began to test me. In particular older women, often considered the guardians
of access to local identity (Giuffrè 2007), engaged in a practice that appeared odd to
my eyes: they constantly provoked me and then watched to see how I would react.
    I found an interesting example of this in my field diary that took place the first
time I visited Maria Giulia’s house, on March 28, 2002:
    “(Entering) Maria Giulia and one of her friends, Nha Dindinha, were making
brincadeira, sexual jokes, and the latter pinched me on the hips. Maria Giulia lifted
her skirt, showing me her underwear …”
    My perplexity made me ugly to their laughing eyes, at the time. I would define
this episode as a sort of test associated with an initiation rite, a test conducted to as-
certain whether or not I was ready to establish a more intimate relationship with
them.
    In that period I was beginning to collect Maria Giulia’s life story and so I began
to visit with her on a daily basis. As she recounted her long story episode by epis-
ode, the ironic register emerged more and more clearly as a result of our increasing
closeness and intimacy or, perhaps, increasing receptivity on my part. Even her
more moving and dramatic accounts were interspersed with jokes. She never failed
to emphasize the fact that she had always used joking as a way of gaining accept-
ance in new contexts and that playfulness, irony and joking were a typical Cape Ver-
dean mode of communication, an essential tool for making friends and being con-
sidered part of the community.

   The turning point: temporary re-aggregation
   Little by little, without even realizing it, I began to understand and take on this
mode of communication. There was no decisive or dramatic proof of this shift but,
similar to the experience Geertz famously describes during his fieldwork in Bali, at
some point something changed and I began to understand “what Cape Verdeans
laugh at”. I still remember the day when, during a visit to Maria Giulia, I found my -
self understanding their jokes and ‘laughing together’ with the other women without
even realizing it. From that point on, women began to invite me to socialize and


23. A creole term meaning someone who “doesn’t understand anything”.


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drink pontche24 with them. I became aware of this turning point during a particular
episode, recorded in my notebook on April 10, 2002, that took place while I was
visiting with Ernestina and Vitoria, two of my interlocutors:
       About three months after my arrival we were sitting on the veranda of my house to
       chat. At some point Ernestina jumped up and said: “Martina, Vitoria, look, there are
       white people!” “Look they are tourists” We turned and saw two tourists who were
       walking along the waterfront. Ernestina points out that they were very pale and we
       started to giggle at them (it should be noted that I was at least as pale as they were). In-
       volving me in this scene in which others were identified as foreigners gave me the feel-
       ing of being considered one of them, ‘part of the landscape’ 25.

    As a matter of fact, for many locals being Cape Verdean depends not on having
been born in Cape Verde but rather “being part of the landscape”, as they say. For
example, a boy from Ponta do Sol who had a relationship with a tourist told me that
it was the first time he had ever been with a white woman. When I pointed out that
actually he had already been with a white girl who had lived for many years on
Santo Antão, he gave me a quizzical look: “Mas ela è caboverdiana!” (“But she is
Cape Verdean!”). Indeed, having lived on the island for many years, she was no
longer considered foreign.
    I had become part of the landscape and so was able to join in making fun of for-
eigners or returning migrants along with the other women. This joking focused on
physical traits such as ‘the fatness of migrants’, their ‘way of dressing’ or ‘the white-
ness of their skin’, all practices employed to emphasize ‘the Otherness of foreigners’.
    In this passage from foreigner to almost Cape Verdean, the key step was under-
standing irony: after a while, Oracio, an interlocutor with whom I spoke frequently,
told me: “Now people are starting to see you as a local, as a Cape Verdean, and not
as a tourist. You speak Crioulo and you know how to joke with people”.
    Alongside my ability to speak Creole, it was specifically my ability to joke that
allowed me to successfully “become Cape Verdean”. Maria Giulia highlighted my
challenge as follows:
       …and then she came to see me, but I am not a beauty… I am ugly, I am black, I am
       poor, I don’t have a place to go when I die, but she likes me, I don’t know why…she li-
       kes me and I don’t know why…I have nothing to offer, plus I am ugly but nice because
       I like to joke, I live for jokes, I’m crazy about joking, I live so I can strive to be nicer,
       I wanted you to become nice, too – when you arrived you weren’t nice but now you are
       (laughing) I have nothing else to say…

24. Drink made by mixing grogue (a sort of brandy) with cane sugar, honey and lemon.
25. In a similar way, Steinmüller (2013) notes that the turning point in his fieldwork that showed that
he had been accepted by the community was when his name appeared on the list of helpers for the
ritual to inaugurate Yang Minghus’s family’s house.


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MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                       228


    Our friendship grew thanks to my ability to share her sense of humour, as Maria
Giulia highlights in her final comment that, in the end, I “became nice”. “I live for
jokes”, Maria Giulia states. While I did not initially comprehend her way of joking,
over time I grew to understand and “became nice” thanks to the fact that I was able
to share the world of Cape Verdean irony with her. As she explained: “One has to
come in little by little, slowly; I go to São Vincente, I don’t know anyone there, I
have to start joking in order to get in.”
    This initiation was enacted through joking or, to use Turner’s term, a liminal mo-
ment that involved not only a shift of status from foreigner to Cape Verdean – a sim-
ple transition – but a highly creative, critical and engaging act, a “true variety of cul-
tural creativity” (Turner 1986: 61) that gave rise to new identities and generated a
new equilibrium and set of practices. It was precisely our relationship that began to
take shape through joking, a relationship built gradually over time thanks to irony
and sharing.
    Even later, after I had learned how to joke, Maria Giulia continued to tease me
over and over, as if I needed cyclical rites of passage to reaffirm my acquired Cape
Verdean-ness. In one of our interviews, for example, she told me “Do you know
what?… Bo è doida… doida… doida… you are more than doida26… and now I’m
going to make a cake and not give you any…”
    It was not only Maria Giulia who continually tested me, however. There were
many episodes in which women made fun of me, which often led to strengthening
existing social relationships and establishing new ones. From time to time women
made fun of me because of the colour of my skin, saying that I was as pale as a sick
person; for not feeling ready to become a mother at thirty years old, an age at which
most of them were already grandmothers; for not knowing how to cook typical
Cape Verdean dishes, and so on. In this way women performed strategies of inclu-
sion/exclusion and distance/proximity, using joking to create a liminoid situation in
which norms were suspended, rules and roles were overturned and new relationships
were formed or existing ones fortified. Obviously, the success of these tests de-
pended on my response to their joking provocations.
    In ironic relationships between people of different cultures, there is often an ini-
tial period of displacement and misunderstanding caused by jokes that develops into
an understanding of the implied irony in the relationship, which ultimately leads to
common ground that can give rise to deep insights. In my case as well, I needed
time to move from displacement to full participation. As previously stated, a condi-
tio sine qua non of becoming part of the Cape Verdean community was understand-
ing and sharing locals’ sense of humour/irony. At the same time, as I have shown,


26. “You are crazy… crazy… crazy… you are more than crazy…”.


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irony and joking relationships can be used as a means of controlling the Other in
which the newcomer is subjected to continuous rites of passage in order to reiterate
his or her membership, as if to say “yes, you are still part of the community”.
   Indeed, in my case the liminal phase never ended in a full re-incorporation into
the community. Rather, I was constantly tested and relegated to the status of
insider/outsider through irony in a way that said, “you are one of us, but not exactly
like us”. This was also evident in everyday practices, where my otherness/belonging
was continuously addressed through irony. For example, I was included in locals’
teasing of tourists, thus implying my ability to understand irony in relation to
strangers; at the same time, however, this teasing reiterated, again ironically, that I
might transition back into foreignness at any moment.
   I would argue more generally that anthropologists never truly complete the rites
of passage requested of them, leaving them in a state of temporary inclusion that
might slip back into marginality at any moment. When anthropologists do succeed
in achieving inclusion, it is a conditional form of inclusion: their position remains
ambiguous and liminal. In my case, this ambiguity was made particularly evident by
the fact that my identity was hybrid, mutable and multifaceted, continuously shifting
in both my own eyes and the eyes of my friends. Many elements conditioned the
ways in which I related with my informants: I was at one and the same time seen as
a foreigner, a curious personage, an adoptee into the culture, a white person, a stu-
dent, a researcher, a professional, an Italian, a friend-confidant, a part of the family,
a daughter-niece, and an intermediary for communicating with relatives who had
migrated to Italy.
   This ambiguity was due to the fact that I asked questions as an anthropologist but
locals answered me as a Cape Verdean. Conversely, at times I asked as an adopted
Cape Verdean but they answered me as an anthropologist. However, as the partner
of a Cape Verdean man I was often seen more as a Cape Verdean woman than as a
researcher, in part thanks to the fact that, for a lengthy portion of my stay, both lo-
cals and I thought I would remain living there forever.

From irony as a shared social practice of complicity to irony as a way of cap-
turing ambiguities
   As I have described in relation to Cape Verde, laughing together is also a shared
social practice, a way for people to recognize common cultural ties, and thus an im-
portant act of intercultural communication. Laughing together creates a space for
communication in which people can test themselves without encroaching too much
on others, which makes it ideal for testing limits. Laughing becomes an act of com-
plicity and reciprocity. As Steinmüller highlights, “embarrassment, irony and all that


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MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                      230


is said as an aside are not understood by everyone, and so they re-produce the
boundaries of a community of complicity” (2013: 228).
   Through my constant mistakes and misunderstandings, I gradually learned to join
this “community of complicity”: on multiple occasions I was included in the “Us
Cape Verdeans” group when dealing with tourists and foreigners passing through
Ponta do Sol or coming to our pub/restaurant. On other occasions I was included in
the “Us women of Cape Verde” group when my female friends and I discussed men
and their behaviour. Several times, my friends and family or returning migrants
came to the town, my partner and close friends asked me to show these “outside
eyes” the best of Ponta do Sol, not lingering for example on less pleasant aspects
that might show the village in a bad light, such as a drunk man or the inadequate
plumbing that forced some residents to use the road instead. “They shouldn’t think
we are underdeveloped!” they told me. Nonetheless, they often addressed the subject
of Ponta do Sol’s underdevelopment in conversations involving only local residents.
   In the interviews, my interlocutors repeatedly addressed the importance of hu-
mour as a relational and communicational strategy that is key to empathizing with
others. Indeed, irony is one of the elements that characterized the majority of Maria
Giulia’s speech. Thanks to the ambiguity implied in the act of joking, Maria Giulia
was able to use irony to express the ambiguity of my position. Speaking about my
“social status”, she affirmed: “Martina cooked, traded at the bar, she had to wash her
clothes as she did not have a servant…she is poor, she doesn’t have money to hire a
servant… (laughing), she is Italian but she is an ‘italiana quebrada’ 27 she doesn’t have
money… (laughing)”.
   When Maria stated that I was poor and could not afford to hire a servant, she was
making fun of me, because she knew that I actually did have a housemaid for the
entire length of my stay. In reality, Maria Giulia was indirectly ranking me, telling
me that I belonged to the wealthy class. By defining me as a “broken Italian”, she
was saying that I was not as rich as other Italians, while at the same time positioning
me among the wealthy component of Cape Verdean community, as if to say “you
belong to the Cape Verdean rich”. Maria Giulia was referring to the Cape Verdean
wealthy, however, not wealthy white tourists. As an Italian I was poor, but as a Cape
Verdean I was rich: it all depended on her point of view and the social group in whi-
ch she located me. Our emotional relationship was reciprocal and clear. Once we
shifted outside the sphere of friendship, however, the ambiguity of our relationship
emerged: “I am not a beauty… I am ugly… she likes me but I don’t know why…”.
According to Maria Giulia, our friendship was justified by her pleasant and likeable


27. “A broken Italian”.


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manner…on a professional level, however, she expressed puzzlement about what I
might possible see in her. She essentially asked, why are you so interested in me?
Although the misunderstanding is already apparent here, it later became even more
evident:
       I already took her to Garça, São Pedro, we already went to Porto Novo, to the feast of
       São João, to Paul and to the feast of Santanton […]. She came here, I made a cake,
       and she watched me the whole time, like a pau de mirão 28, to learn from everything
       that I was doing, but she learned nothing, she doesn’t have the brains to learn, I made
       bread and she watched me the whole time, I made a cake and she watched me the
       whole time, I put the cake on the plate and she kept looking, but she never learned to
       make one, she doesn’t have the brains, she has looks but no brains… [laughing] she’s
       got no head… she doesn’t have the brains…

   She continued:
       I don’t know if it’s because of love that she’s not learning much… but she came in the
       morning and left at noon, I made a cake and she used to watch me the whole time, I
       was preparing the cake and she kept looking at me, I cut the cake and she was good at
       eating it (that was all she was good at)!!! ‘Cause she is manhenta 29.. [laughing]…[…]. I
       showed you the roscas30 that I make, and the different guitar shaped biscuits, … I
       make prayer beads to carry on your shoulders and showed you how they’re worn, while
       seated I showed you how to put them on so that when you go back to Italy you can do
       it too if you want… but you don’t do it né gaita 31… [laughing] ‘cause you don’t know
       how to make them…[laughing] you made me sit for hours and made me talk so as to
       be able to carry on your work…so what else would you have liked me to do for you? I
       showed you the tostão32[…] in order to talk to you and to be able to carry on your
       work…so what else would you have liked me to do for you ?

   She always joked when talking about my role and my position as a way of ex-
pressing that she did not understand what I was doing. In this way the ironic rela-
tionship also indicated an intercultural and interpersonal misunderstanding. It was
mainly through joking that we were able to convey our divergent perceptions and
address the insider/outsider status typical of anthropologists (in my case, both a
Cape Verdean acquired friend/niece and a foreign anthropologist). According to
Emerson (1969), the language of joking is the only language that allows one to ex-
press critique, thanks to the paradox through which a joke both affirms something
and denies it at one and the same time.

28. “Statue”.
29. “Astute, she has bad habits”.
30. A candy, cookie or bread typical of Patron Saint feasts that is made in certain special shapes (for
examples guitars, fish, dolls).
31. “Not at all”.
32. The Cape Verdean currency prior to Independence (1975).


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MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                                     232


    These excerpts from my interviews clearly show that Maria Giulia viewed my
continuous observation as strange and nonsensical. “She would always watch me, but
she didn’t learn much, she doesn’t have the brains for it”, Maria stated. My observa-
tion was incomprehensible in her eyes because, since I did not go on to do the things
I had observed her doing, it did not seem to be directed towards a practical end.
Why spend so much time watching me make the Romaria33 sweets if you have no
intention of making and selling them at the Patron Saint celebrations? Why ask to
see how the prayer beads and the romaria sweets are made if you are not going to
make them yourself? Maria Giulia seemed to wonder.
    At multiple points during our interview Maria repeated the phrase ela estava
sempre em cima de mi (she was always watching me) and added: como un pao de
mirão (like a statue). Maria taught me and let me observe her to help me with my
job, because of our friendship: “you made me stay in the house for hours and hours
and made me speak in order to do your job…what else would you have liked me to
do for you?” Nonetheless, the meaning I attributed to our work together seems to
escape her. In reality, I was fairly sure that I had explained it quite thoroughly and
that she had understood my explanation. However, it was also obvious that I did not
understand her perception of what we were doing in the time we spent together at
her house. It was also unclear to her who my work was intended for. As Maria Giu-
lia said:
       At the beginning I couldn’t understand, but then she explained it to me and I helped
       her, I helped her and I believe that her fellow Italians liked it, Italian people liked it
       and especially your professor, because he’s interested, but now I don’t know what to do
       with you anymore… Who’s going to read it?

   It is obvious that the anthropological profession is not as clear to our ‘informants’
as it is to us anthropologists, with the exception of certain cases such as the indigen-
ous South Americans who, as Fabietti writes, “tired of the continuous attention that
anthropologist gave them, eventually put out signs that said, ‘we no longer accept an-
thropologists’” (Fabietti 2005: 65)34. Informants strive to classify anthropologists in
the appropriate category (Wagner 1981), but this is not always a simple task. As La
Cecla states (2003: 80), anthropologists are always at work with intercultural trans-

33. Feasts of Patron Saints.
34. Another relevant body of literature is that written by authors who belong to minority groups, of-
ten the “object” of studies, “who comment ironically on the role of anthropologists as connected to
imperialist policies”. I refer for example to authors such as Edwaard Said, Talal Asad and Valentine
Mudimbe. The work of Vine Deloria jr. (1969) is of particular relevance. In chapter four of “An-
thropologists and Other Friends”, the author writes: “But indians have been cursed above all other
people in history, Indians have anthropologists” (Vine Deloria in Fernandez, Huber 2001: 20).


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lations that are continually recreated and called into question. Their position is ex-
tremely precarious and often difficult to explain (why should somebody who only
wants to observe and live among us be accepted? What is his/her job?). How can
the role of the anthropologist within a group be justified?
    The answer that Maria Giulia herself gave about our work – that it would be used
by my professor and the Italian people – indicates that she believed she was spea-
king to an important audience and that this act of communication transcended the
interpersonal to become public in scope.
    This interview, along with ethnographic material I collected, gave me many in-
sights to reflect upon; at this point I would like to explore a few of them. First of all,
by stating that she was motivated to help me with my work, Maria Giulia attested to
the importance of empathy in the dialogic relationship. This kind of empathy is not
ethnocentric; rather, it is “analogical and reflexive”, a kind of congeniality or fellow
feeling that Chiara Pussetti describes as a “contamination of emotions” that occurs
“through the continuous reformulation of one’s own experience and categories, act-
ive participation, open-mindedness and patience” (2005: 22). It is precisely this
“contamination of emotions” that Maria Giulia referred to in describing our like-
mindedness. Secondly, Maria Giulia repeatedly made statements confirming (once
again) that humour is a constitutive element of Cape Verdean culture and key social
strategy (indeed, the practice of brincadeira is sacred). As in the case of Cape
Verde, frequently anthropologists are only able to enter into other cultures by joking
with the members of that culture, and this involves risking their own reputations.
Certainly all anthropologists have had the experience of being mocked by their hosts
during their initial stay in the field as a result of not having performed the “right be-
haviour” in specific circumstances, and this mocking is often utilized by hosts as a
way to “soften the critical aspects of settling in at first” (Colajanni 1980: 403) 35.
This appears to be a paradox. As I have noted, near the beginning of my time in
Cape Verde, people laughed at both my behaviour and me as a person. Although at
the time I did not understand why, looking back I realize that it was indeed a way of
making make me feel that I was held at a distance, which was followed by social
testing; however, at the same time it was probably also an effort on their part to in-
clude the Other. “You were not nice, but slowly slowly I was able to make you nice”
Maria Giulia told me. Humour, in any case, should always be read as part of a spe-
cific cultural context wherein multiple and diverse meanings are being utilized sim-



35. On the subject of research participants mocking anthropologists, see Colajanni 1980; Geertz
1973; Clifford 1988; La Cecla 2003; Steinmüller 2013.


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MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                               234


ultaneously36. In the case of Cape Verde, as mentioned earlier, appearing ridiculous
and silly facilitates communication in that it renders the foreign “human” and there-
fore less threatening. At the same time, joking serves as a relationship-building
strategy. As I have shown, Maria Giulia and my other interlocutors used joking as a
strategy for connecting and building intimacy, like a rite of initiation that tested the
newcomer, expressing the idea that, “if you are able to joke like us then you are one
of us”. Moreover, by stating the opposite of what one really means in such a way
that the listener understands the true meaning, which presupposes complicity and
common ground wherein the communicative reversal is clear, irony is well-suited to
expressing elements of ambiguity in which any statement can become its opposite,
partly true or partly false, depending on the setting.
    As mentioned above, it is precisely by using irony to describe me that Maria Gi-
ulia was able to so effectively capture my ambiguous position of insider/outsider,
simultaneously a privileged West European (yet not as rich as other Westerners) and
a foreigner, almost (but not yet) ready to become Cape Verdean: you are too Cape
Verdean to be a Westerner – she seemed to say – but too western to be Cape Ver-
dean. At the same time, however, she recognized that I belonged to a common
space, the space of being Cape Verdean, in which irony was shared and understood.
    In the Cape Verde ethnographic context I have described, jokes provide heuristic
opportunities for expressing differences, misunderstandings and ambiguities as well
as reflecting upon these elements, and this capacity appears to be one of the most in-
teresting elements the ethnographic encounter offers its participants. If we view the
ethnographic relationship as a space in which emotion and resonance are the prerog-
ative of both the anthropologist and the informant, in which there is a condition of
reciprocal exchange and awareness in the attempt to construct a common universe
of reference, we embark on a difficult and extremely complex path that is inevitably
open to misunderstandings.
    Although I was initially discouraged, over time I learned that misunderstanding
can be quite meaningful and important for discovering aspects of meaning and
nuances that would otherwise have remained hidden. In my interview with Maria
Giulia, I was able to grasp the heuristic potential of misunderstanding that emerged
through humour with particular clarity specifically because joking led me to more
fully comprehend my informant and her culture. For one, it was joking that allowed
Maria Giulia to express her image of me, an image conditioned by the inextricable
web of my multifaceted belonging (both Cape Verdean and anthropologist) in which

36. In many cultures, for instance, laughter and jokes are only possible among friends, serving to
strengthen internal ties. One of these is the Aymara in Bolivia, as described by the anthropologist
Miracle (1991), for whom joking is only allowed among friends and acquaintances; for the Aymara,
to engage in these behaviors in front of foreigners would be deemed offensive.


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IRONY AND JOKING IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK                                         235


the former identity enveloped the latter, thus highlighting the discrepancy between
my own self-representation and her perception of me. As I have noted, my point of
view was that of an extremely participatory anthropologist… in contrast, Maria Giu-
lia’s portrayal of my role more closely resembled the stereotype of a positivist anth-
ropologist who observes from afar without participating. This moment of dissonan-
ce revealed an essential trait of Cape Verdean culture in which “knowing” means fir-
st and foremost knowing how to make things (see for instance Jackson 1983). For
Maria Giulia, therefore, understanding feminine identity depended on understanding
practical tasks: in order to understand Cape Verdean women, it seems, I had to en-
gage in their feminine practices. Maria Giulia was telling me to “take a mental leap”.
In so doing, she was inviting me to put aside my Otherness: she knew that my re-
search aims were not limited to entering the practical domain of femaleness, that my
fieldwork did not simply comprise experiencing my womanliness through doing. In-
stead, it was precisely by observing without the intention of doing that my Otherness
became manifest. In this case, however, Maria Giulia was criticizing me despite my
accepted Otherness, making fun of me but without insulting me (I did not behave
like a Cape Verdean woman, she observed); at the same time, she was letting me
know that she considered me one of the locals because I was able to share in their
jokes. Through this misunderstanding, Maria Giulia unwittingly gave me an anthro-
pological lesson and the chance to reflect upon a mistake that I had risked commit-
ting: failing to take into consideration the practical side of Cape Verdean culture.

Conclusion
   As I have shown, irony, joking and humour are key issues for anthropological
practice and field research. Although scholars have made important strides forward
in last two decades, irony still remains a somewhat under-investigated topic in an-
thropology. As scholars have shown, irony also represents a practice of resistance
that is enacted in particular in the face of discrimination or in response to asymmet-
ric power relations such as those, which, to a greater or lesser degree, characterize
the relationship between anthropologists and their interlocutors. As many scholars
have pointed out, irony is also a way of resisting/excluding the Other, those who
come from Outside; at the same time, however, it is also a way of testing the out-
sider’s suitability for inclusion.
   In Cape Verde, the anthropologist coming from the outside world is an ambigu-
ous figure: on one hand this Otherness inspires distrust and fear, so that irony direc-
ted at such outsiders is a way of both isolating them from the community and reaf-
firming the holos. On the other hand, humour is a way of making outsiders less dan-
gerous, of humanizing them and thus facilitating their inclusion. And yet this inclu-
sion depends on the Other (and thus the anthropologist as well) learning to share the

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MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                   236


communicative mode of the community in question. In Cape Verde, this entire pro-
cess, from exclusion to inclusion through irony, can be seen as a rite of passage that
is continuously reproduced without ever reaching a definitive conclusion, thus allow-
ing local people to manage the ambiguity of the Other without dissolving it.
    However, the ironic practices locals engaged in with me, practices that set the
challenges I had to overcome as part of the rite of passage for determining my inclu-
sion in the community, worked to both include excluding and exclude including.
    At the same time, their joking thus appears to have been a useful strategy for
managing the ambiguity generated by my presence, casting me into a kind of liminal
state in which I was considered neither completely foreign nor completely part of
the community, an insider/outsider whose insider status was subject to recurrent
testing. With my inclusion in the community constantly called into question, there
was a continual risk that I slip back into a liminal state: too Cape Verdean to be
Italian but too Italian to be Cape Verdean. The inhabitants of Ponta do Sol thus ap-
pear to have used irony to manage the liminality of the Other while at the same time
preserving their “cultural intimacy”.
    Moreover jokes, humour and irony can play a fundamental role in the encounter
between different cultures in that they reaffirm differences while at the same time
downplaying them, allowing the encounter to take place precisely because the “in-
sincere” character of the communication is explicit. Irony in particular provides a
means to vocalize ambiguities in the ethnographic encounter, as it allows the anthro-
pologist and interviewee to establish a relationship based on humour in which im-
plied or unspoken meaning is mutually understood. As my experience in Ponta do
Sol indicates, irony and joking are fundamental instruments for managing the forms
of difference that inevitably involve ambiguity. Finally, as indicated by the feedback
from my interlocutor Maria Giulia, humour is also a key element of intercultural
communication that can potentially aid us in managing the emergence of a zone of
misunderstanding: in the context of an ironic relationship, such misunderstanding
has the potential to be meaningful and fruitfaul, allowing us to discover different
ways of experiencing intercultural encounters. These discoveries in turn suggest new
paths, intuitions, and precious insights that can be developed and incorporated into
anthropological discourse.




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IRONY AND JOKING IN ETHNOGRAPHIC FIELDWORK                                                 237




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MARTINA GIUFFRÈ                                                                            238

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 Martina GIUFFRÈ is a Researcher in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Sassari.
 For years her research has engaged migration and gender issues as well as oral sources,
 while more recently she has focused on Roma issues. She has taught at many universities:
 “La Sapienza” University of Rome, the University of Florence and the University of
 Naples “L’Orientale.” She has conducted extensive fieldwork in Cape Verde, Australia,
 Italy, Romania, Spain and Belgium. She has also coordinated a number of cultural events
 and national and international projects. Since 2010 she has directed the CISU editorial
 series “Migration”.




                                                                              Martina GIUFFRÈ
                                                                           Università di Sassari
                                                                        martinagiuffre@yahoo.it




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Martina Giuffrè
IIrony and joking in ethnographic fieldwork: Reflections from Santo Antão Island (Cape Verde)
2015 ⎸ANUAC. VOL. 4, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2015: 213-240.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-1981
