In Samoa today the transvestite plays a role once played by pre‐Christian girls in nighttime exchanges of entertainment. Ambiguous and liminal in “her” relation to gender categories, the Samoan transvestite acts out a jest about these categories. This jest dramatically illustrates the importance of a sensitivity to local humor and to ironic modes of self‐representation in ethnographic perspectives on sex roles, social structure, and personhood. The form of humor “she” practices also sheds light on the place of the erotic in Samoa from the missionization period to the present, a subject that has long preoccupied the anthropological imagination. [cultural change, Samoa, transvestism, humor, gender]
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Jeannette Marie Mageo (1992) studied this question.