Tracing silences: Towards an anthropology of the unspoken and unspeakable

ABSTRACT

Silence is crucial to our social world. Responding to the growing scholarly interest among anthropologists and historians in more in-depth engagements with social silence, in this special issue we argue for a theorization of silences that is at once more robust and open to the particular; a theorization, we suggest, that embraces multivocality, unintelligibility, and uncertainty of interpretation. We ask what it means to trace silences, and to include traces of silence in our ethnographic representations. What qualifies as silence, and how does it relate to articulation; to voice, visibility and representation? How can silences be sensed and experienced viscerally as well as narratively? And how do we think with and start interpreting silences in the face of potential unknowability? The contributions to this special issue suggest that tracing silences, through a range of modes and methods, and in the historical, social and political ways in which they emerge and are enacted in the particularities of people’s lives, is a crucial task for historians and anthropologists alike.

KEYWORDS:

• Silence
• traces
• articulation
• haunting

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Pinto (2008, 163–174) for an elaboration of the ways in which scholarly attempts to fill in silence often come to support dominant discourses.

2 The two other presenters on our panel, Asha Abeyasekera and Stavroula Pipyrou, have pursued publication of their beautiful papers elsewhere (see Abeyasekera n.d.; Pipyrou 2020). We thankfully acknowledge their inspiring partaking in our discussions.

3 For a brilliant and beautiful reflection on Mary Steedly’s work and life, see Lahiri, Spyer, and Strassler (2020) and the contributions in their edited collection.