Susanna Trnka – författare

This book engages anthropologically with humor as political expression. It reveals how humor is in many instances central to human efforts to cope with political struggle and significant to understanding power dynamics in socio-political life. The chapters examine humor and joking activities across a diverse range of geographic areas and cultural contexts. The contributors consider humor as it is constituted in political anxiety, aggression and power, and when it becomes a tool to resist, repair, reconcile or make a moral claim. Collectively they demonstrate that humor can provide a powerful critique, a non-violent form of political protest and the space for restoration of human dignity.

This book engages anthropologically with humor as political expression. It reveals how humor is in many instances central to human efforts to cope with political struggle and significant to understanding power dynamics in socio-political life. The chapters examine humor and joking activities across a diverse range of geographic areas and cultural contexts. The contributors consider humor as it is constituted in political anxiety, aggression and power, and when it becomes a tool to resist, repair, reconcile or make a moral claim. Collectively they demonstrate that humor can provide a powerful critique, a non-violent form of political protest and the space for restoration of human dignity.

Combining rich personal accounts from twelve veteran anthropologists with reflexive analyses of the state of anthropology today, this book is a treatise on theory and method offering fresh insights into the production of anthropological knowledge, from the creation of key concepts to major paradigm shifts. Particular focus is given to how ‘peripheral perspectives’ can help re-shape the discipline and the ways that anthropologists think about contemporary culture and society. From urban Maori communities in Aotearoa/New Zealand to the Highlands of Papua New Guinea, from Arnhem Land in Australia to the villages of Yorkshire, these accounts take us to the heart of the anthropological endeavour, decentring mainstream perspectives, and revealing the intimate relationships and processes that create anthropological knowledge.

What does disgust have to do with citizenship? How might pain and pleasure, movement, taste, sound and smell be configured as aspects of national belonging? Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life examines the intersections between sensory phenomena and national and supra-national forms of belonging, introducing the new concept of sensory citizenship. Expanding upon contemporary understandings of the rights and duties of citizens, the volume presents anthropological investigations of the sensory aspects of participation in collectivities such as face-to-face communities, ethnic groups, nations and transnational entities. Rethinking relationships between ideology, aesthetics, affect and bodily experience, the authors reveal the multiple political effects of the senses. The book demonstrates how various elements of political life, including some of the most fundamental aspects of citizenship, rest not only upon our senses, but on their perceived naturalization. Vivid ethnographic examples of sensory citizenship in Europe, the United States, the Pacific, Asia and the Middle East explore themes such as sight in political constructions; smell and ethnic conflict; pain in the constitution of communities; national soundscapes; taste in national identities; movement, memory and emplacement.

What does disgust have to do with citizenship? How might pain and pleasure, movement, taste, sound and smell be configured as aspects of national belonging? Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life examines the intersections between sensory phenomena and national and supra-national forms of belonging, introducing the new concept of sensory citizenship. Expanding upon contemporary understandings of the rights and duties of citizens, the volume presents anthropological investigations of the sensory aspects of participation in collectivities such as face-to-face communities, ethnic groups, nations and transnational entities. Rethinking relationships between ideology, aesthetics, affect and bodily experience, the authors reveal the multiple political effects of the senses. The book demonstrates how various elements of political life, including some of the most fundamental aspects of citizenship, rest not only upon our senses, but on their perceived naturalization. Vivid ethnographic examples of sensory citizenship in Europe, the United States, the Pacific, Asia and the Middle East explore themes such as sight in political constructions; smell and ethnic conflict; pain in the constitution of communities; national soundscapes; taste in national identities; movement, memory and emplacement.

What does it mean to be healthy? Is it a measure of physical illness, of a mental health condition, or of emotional control? In twenty-first-century Aotearoa/New Zealand, it is all of the above. Being healthy in this country requires an investment of extensive work, resources, and time. Because while it encompasses the above categories, for many young people in Aotearoa/New Zealand, health also extends to having strong, trusted friendships—to feeling that one’s emotions are being recognized while recognizing the emotions of others. Health for these youth may also consist of creating a daily space for mindfulness while maintaining productivity; working up the motivation to work out; quantifying and graphing nutrition stats; being able to talk openly about one’s mental health; and maybe even wearing the right lipstick.These activities are particularly salient in Aotearoa/New Zealand where the past forty years have witnessed a growing emphasis on the importance of patient “self-responsibility” and where the state has invested heavily in health, even introducing a “wellbeing budget” that tracks the economy via wellbeing measures. All of these activities add up to a concept—and a worldview—that anthropologist Susanna Trnka conceptualizes as healthization. Through this framework, managing one’s emotions, keeping one’s sense of “balance,” and tracking the number of miles run, swum, or bicycled, become overlapping, all-consuming activities, to the point of almost encompassing life itself. By analyzing ethnographic interviews with young people, Trnka reveals the emotional, financial, and deeply personal ideas at stake as understandings of health shift in the minds of young people. Often at the vanguard of new trends in mental health, physical fitness, and digital health technologies, the youth in Aotearoa/New Zealand enact what it means to be well in the twenty-first century.