Kichwa joke-telling in global tourism

Abstract

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 ( Antrosio & Colloredo‑Mansfeld, 2015 ), “feelingful,” and “intimate” ( Webster, 2015 ) 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 ( Sherzer 1987 ; Urban, 1991 ; Hill, 2008 ) and as tactical speech play ( Sherzer, 2002 ; Bauman, 1981 ; Bunten, 2010 , 2015 ), I integrate linguistic, cultural, auto‑ethnographic, and neuro‑somatic approaches — including theories of synesthesia, phantom pain, and mirror‑box regeneration ( Ramachandran, 1998 ). Ultimately, Kichwa joking reveals “heritage” as socially embodied, perceptually illusive, and politically generative.