Joking and Avoidance, Hostility and Incest: An Essay on Gisu Moral Categories

This article discusses joking and avoidance relationships among the Gisu in the context of kinship classifications and behaviour, arguing that these behaviours should be seen as setting the parameters for moral discourse. The basis of the Gisu social order rests with lukoosi, a restraint whlch is sanctified in the person of the mother-in-law who is revered by avoidance. Joking partners, on the other hand, may revile each other with impunity; with them any contact seems possible. Thejoking relationship is a fixed point in the 'normal' constellation ofsocial relationships, and encodes its own ritualhsed form of self-abnegation. It is seen to have its origin in a peace pact and the licence which becomes possible rests on the fact that the parties have forsworn vengeance. Mother-in-law avoidance and the joking relationship encode contrasting dramas of renunciation; of love and sexuality in the one instance and of hatred and warfare in the other. The subject of this article is the meaning of joking and avoidance patterns in an East African society, that of the Gisu of Uganda. I aim to provide a new way of looking at a topic as old as academic anthropology, yet one which still presents itself as a 'puzzle'. Indeed, the very 'oddness' ofAfricanjoking forms has led to the development of an interpretative literature around them and the critical parameters of kinship structure with which they are often associated. Radcliffe-Brown defined joking relationships in terms of their essential ambivalence. They are a 'peculiar combination of friendliness and antagonism' (1952 [1940]: 91), a play upon enmity, which gives simultaneous expression to the common and divergent interests ofparties to an alliance. He saw avoidance relationships as another means of achieving the same end, namely, of managing potentially difficult ties of alliance. The Gisu have both these relationship forms; indeed they might be said to have extreme versions ofthem. Avoidance between mother-in-law and son-in-law is virtually total, whilst joking between non-kin is marked by an exaggerated element of hostility. It is not only these relationships that are odd but also the entire system of classificatory kinships. What, we might ask, is the point of all this specification of conduct? Why is appropriate human conduct cut up and distributed among different categories ofrelative in the way that it is? We might of course accept, with Radcliffe-Brown, that it works to regulate action and to resolve points of tension in the social structure, but to go further we need to enquire into what it is saying about the basic parameters of moral action, about the essential categories of social life and of human possibility. I follow Schneider's (1968) lead in moving from a 'social' to a more 'cultural' level of analysis, from a dominating concern with 'structure' to one more concerned with