Afterword: Haunted histories and the silences of everyday life

ABSTRACT

This Afterword explores the complex relations of anthropological thinking about silence and hauntology. It distinguishes among those papers that focus on silence and silencing in relation to historical trauma and those that focus on the place of silence in the rhythms of everyday life. An attention to the concealment and repression of memories of historical violence, which continue to haunt the present, are linked here and in the hauntology/spectrality literature to Derrida’s conceptualization of hauntology, but also to Abraham and Torok’s [1986. The Wolf Man's Magic Word: A Cryptonomy. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press] classic notion of the encryptment of hidden affective complexes, passed along unconsciously from generation to generation. The role of giving voice to such ‘phantoms’ as therapeutic is discussed and contested throughout this collection, suggesting more complex views of the relations between silence and voice. Over against the focus on silence as concealed trauma, Weller elaborates a notion of silence as essential to the everyday, to music, narrative and ritual, and intimately linked to the silence of loss and longing. This view of silence is brought into conversation with Rahimi’s work on [2021. The Hauntology of Everyday Life. New York: Springer International Publishing]. The relation of the aural, of voice and silence, to the visual, the visible and the hidden, is an important theme in this work. The Afterword honours Mary Steedly, who was to be the commentator on the original presentation of these papers. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of her writings on transparency and apparition, on silence as a ‘gift’ and mourning as a means of resolution of historical trauma.

KEYWORDS:

• Hauntology
• historical trauma
• silence
• Abraham and Torok
• Mary Steedly

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See Good (2019) for a partial review. See, for example, Cho (2008), Gammeltoft (2014), Good (2015), Han (2021), Johnson (2014), Kitiarsa (2011), Klima (2019), Kwon (2008), Langford (2013), Morris (2008).

2 See also Rahimi (2015, 2016).