Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Cultural Anthropology

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities

Primary Theme: Resilience

Secondary Theme: The Political

(4-0250) Towards an Anthropology of Joy

Anthropological scholarship has explored how systemic forces define, constrain, and govern people's lives, while paying less attention to, or being deeply suspicious of, the joys and pleasures of human experience. This panel considers the embodied experience of joy as a sensory force that sways people's lives amidst and against the forces of structural violence. An emphasis on joy does not deny the pervasiveness of violence and social suffering, nor that, as Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed have pointed out, happiness can also be a construct used to justify social oppression. Rather, this panel pays ethnographic attention to embodied experiences of joy and happiness as transitory spaces or moments of vitality that reverberate in everyday life. This joy can be individual or collective, arising from losing oneself in an activity to contemplating and creating beauty. We aim to discuss how such experiences may become the basis for artistic creativity, political mobilization, the building of community or creating a new sense of self. This panel holds open the possibility of dwelling in joy itself as a realm of experience that could generate its own forms of analysis. We suggest that a focus on joy as an ethnographic object of study challenges the centrality of critique in the discipline's ethical claims, while also inspiring new theoretical outlooks.

Presenter(s)

• Brian Horton

  PhD Candidate
  Brown University

Organizer(s)

• Yana Stainova

  Dartmouth College

Chair(s)

• Yana Stainova

  Dartmouth College

Presenter(s)

• Yana Stainova

  Dartmouth College

Organizer(s)

• Jonathan Anjaria

  Associate Professor
  Brandeis University

Presenter(s)

• Jonathan Anjaria

  Associate Professor
  Brandeis University

• Robert Desjarlais

  Sarah Lawrence College

• Camille Frazier

  Assistant Professor
  Clarkson University

Discussant(s)

• Celina de Sa

  Thurgood Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow
  Dartmouth College

Presentations:

• 8:00 AM - 8:15 AM

  Cruising Toilets and Spoiling Futures: Happiness without “the Good Life”?
  Brian Andrew Christopher Horton – Brown University
• 8:15 AM - 8:30 AM

  The practice of joy: Playing music as an act of creation in Venezuela
  Yana Stainova – Dartmouth College
• 8:30 AM - 8:45 AM

  Bicycle Love: Leisure, exposure and the pleasures of movement
  Jonathan Shapiro Anjaria – Brandeis University
• 8:45 AM - 9:00 AM

  Paris Graff: On the ludic joy of street art and graffiti
  Robert Desjarlais – Sarah Lawrence College
• 9:00 AM - 9:15 AM

  The Joy of “Getting Mitti (Soil) Under Your Nails”: Gardening Among India’s Urban Middle Class
  Camille Frazier – Clarkson University
• 9:15 AM - 9:30 AM

  Discussion
  Celina de Sa – Dartmouth College