When I took on this challenge, I was hoping that page 99 of my dissertation would happen to contain some brilliant insight of mine, or at least some fascinating material from my topic of study: a Bolivian comedy series that first appeared on television in the early 2000s. Comedy sketches from this series were later posted to YouTube, where they continued to attract views and comments throughout the Evo Morales presidency (2006-2019), a time of major social and political change in Bolivia. As I show, Bolivian viewers drew on these sketches to discursively construct their sense of regional and national identity and to engage with the social and political processes unfolding at the time.

What I found instead was a page from my second chapter, in which I review the literature on humor, social identity, and social difference and apply insights from previous studies to my analysis of one comedy sketch. After introducing ethnic humor as a means for social groups to construct their own identities and to differentiate between themselves and others, I wrote on page 99, “As ethnic humor shifts over time, it both reveals and contributes to changing configurations of social reality. For these reasons, humor about social identity and social difference can be studied as a way to trace boundary shifts that [take] place in society over time.”

My analysis of this chapter’s comedy sketch bears out this observation. The choice of the sketch’s two protagonists, one of whom is a Camba from the Bolivian lowlands and the other a Colla from the Andean highlands, attests to the salience of these two social groups in Bolivia during the Morales era. At the same time, the ways in which the characters relate to each other point to shifts in popular understandings of what it meant to be Camba in the early 2000s, reflected in viewer comments debating who could claim this locally important social identity.

Considering the place of page 99 in my dissertation has allowed me to reflect on the twists and turns of the writing process. Except for my conclusions, Chapter 2 was the last chapter I wrote and was probably the one I struggled with the most; I had originally planned to include the literature on humor in Chapter 1 and save all sketch analysis for later chapters, but what eventually became Chapter 2 kept demanding a place of its own. In the end, this chapter turned out to be the heart of my dissertation—my tentative answer, to be drawn out in the chapters that follow, to why comedy matters in the serious work of navigating social change.

Anita L. Zandstra. 2024. Identity and alterity in a comedy series from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, during the presidency of Evo Morales. Western Michigan University Ph.D. https://www.proquest.com/docview/3052976852?sourcetype=Dissertations%20&%20Theses