Tracing Silences

Towards an Anthropology of the Unspoken and Unspeakable

Ana Dragojlovic, Annemarie Samuels, Ana Dragojlovic, Annemarie Samuels

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032496870
• eBook ISBN: 9781000889017
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Silence is crucial to our social world. Responding to the growing scholarly interest in social sciences and humanities for more in-depth engagements with social silence, this book explores what it means to trace silences and to include traces of silences in our scholarly 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 interpret silences in the face of potential unknowability? Grounded in ethnographic research in the Netherlands, Israel, Turkey, China, and Indonesia, the chapters all contribute to a theorization of silence that embraces multivocality, unintelligibility and uncertainty of interpretation. As a collection of cutting-edge scholarly work at the intersection of anthropology and history, Tracing Silences argues for an in-depth engagement with the unspeakable and unspoken, 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.

This book will be of interest to scholars and students of history, anthropology, sociology, political science and archival studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of History and Anthropology.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation information
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction—Tracing silences: Towards an anthropology of the unspoken and unspeakable
• 1 Practising affect for haunted speakability: Triggering trauma through an interactive art project
• 2 Emancipatory voice and the recursivity of authentic silence: Holocaust descendant accounts of the dialectic between silence and voice
• 3 ‘Devious silence’: Refugee art, memory activism, and the unspeakability of loss among Syrians in Turkey
• 4 Respecting silence: Longing, rhythm, and Chinese temples in an age of bulldozers
• 5 Strategies of silence in an age of transparency: Navigating HIV and visibility in Aceh, Indonesia
• Afterword: Haunted histories and the silences of everyday life
• Index