Kichwa joke-telling in global tourism

Abstract

This study examines how Otavalan Kichwa vendors, cultural experts, and migrants deploy joking as a multisensory form of intimacy that reshapes cross‑cultural learning of “heritage” within global tourism economies. Jokes, I argue, can be used instructionally and tactically because of their sensory dimensions: in real time, they mobilize sound, motion, touch, color, and emotion to produce moral‑economic (

), “feelingful,” and “intimate” ( ) labor. Drawing on seventeen months of cumulative fieldwork, I analyze three jokes performed across everyday exchanges in Otavalo, semi‑private tourism encounters, and public enactments of Indigeneity abroad. Treating these jokes as discourse ( ; ; ) and as tactical speech play ( ; ; , ), I integrate linguistic, cultural, auto‑ethnographic, and neuro‑somatic approaches — including theories of synesthesia, phantom pain, and mirror‑box regeneration ( ). Ultimately, Kichwa joking reveals “heritage” as socially embodied, perceptually illusive, and politically generative.