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Sean Dowdy '05 Presents: “This is Jukowa”: The Ethics of Foreplay in Assam, India

April 12 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM

Alumni Hall, Room 300 (Evelyn Handler Room)

This event is open to the public.

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Jukowa, a genre of exhortative play in Assam (Northeast India), is built of jokes without punchlines, actions without clear conditions, play without conclusion—and this without contradistinction to ordinary life. In a nutshell, jukowa is a casual incitement of another to future action rather than a consummate action in and of itself.

Literally meaning “foreplay,” jukowa is all about the conditional, the deferred, a kind of communication that oscillates, peaks, slumps, but never fulfills or finalizes. As such, it draws participants into the “who,” “when,” and “how” of eliciting a future action from someone else—and what the entailments of that future action could be.

Drawing on several years of ethnographic research in Assam, this talk showcases the semiotic and pragmatic dimensions of jukowa across various pair-part interactions in order to outline their implicit and explicit ethical orientations. Locating jukowa in the present, as part of a larger trend of exhortative therapy and inter-ethnic reconciliation in post-insurgency Assam, this talk concludes with critical reflections on what both the anthropology of ethics and anthropological theories of play have overlooked and how they might be integrated into a broader study of actually existing methods of “disalienation” (in Frantz Fanon’s sense of the term) in the twenty-first century.