Non-serious archives: An anthropology of playing with in rural Kashmir

This article observes that in everyday life, humour and laughter recast ongoing realities of pain and suffering, often described in terms of a tragedy, as simultaneously comic. Drawing on an ethnography of joking, I posit that improvising on an existing vocabulary, humour is an archive of the non-serious wherein such realities are embraced and mobilised into the play-frame through joking and humorous storytelling. Going beyond framings of humour either as pleasure or as a weapon of the weak, I find that the kind of humour that this ethnography offers signifies a playful disposition of not speaking seriously, which not only brings relief but also insists on a particular mode of playing with that occasionally provides joy and vitality.