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This paper explores family secrets and silences surrounding sent-away second daughters under China’s One-Child Policy. Through ethnographic life histories, it shows how unspoken separations shape family relations, moral reasoning, intimacy, and fragile dialogue decades after the policy’s end.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how family secrets and silences were produced under China’s One-Child Policy. Introduced in 1979, the policy subjected reproduction and family formation to intensive state regulation. In Chinese rural areas, families were permitted a second birth only if the first child was female. When the second child was also a daughter, long-standing son preference intersected with policy constraints, leading some families to quietly send the newborn girl to relatives or childless households. These decisions were shaped not only by fear of administrative punishment and economic hardship but also by gendered expectations surrounding lineage and family continuity.

Although the family planning policy has been formally terminated, the social and emotional consequences it generated have not disappeared. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Shandong Province, this paper traces how secrecy and silence continue to structure family relations decades after the policy’s end. Silence operates not merely as the absence of speech but as a patterned mode of interaction through which families manage a difficult past. Parents avoid compress narratives into moralized explanations, or displace responsibility onto historical necessity, while everyday family encounters are organized around what cannot be asked, remembered, or acknowledged. For sent-away daughters, silence becomes a relational condition shaping intimacy, belonging, and self-understanding, often persisting even after reunion with biological kin. By attending ethnographically to silence itself, this paper shows how family secrets function as a means of managing guilt, preserving fragile relationships, and containing unresolved moral conflict long after the policy that produced them has ended.

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This paper explores the consequences of disguising information to their adopted children by the adoptive parents, the impact of the badly kept family secret on some adoptees, and the adoptees' discourses on this further trauma decades after adoption occurred.

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This paper explores a case of transnacional adoption of Chilean-born children adopted by Sardinian couples approximately four decades ago. Deprived of governmental or private professional support, the new parents - often living in rural areas - had to deal with sometimes grown-up children without any psychological or pedagogical preparation. This often resulted in a reluctance to embrace their children's history, as well as their own, for fear of inflicting further pain and as an extreme measure of parental protection. This implied that they decided - in good faith - to withdraw the adoption story and pretend it never happened, never mentioning their origin to their children. However, the family secret is usually well known by others who more or less innocently informed the adoptees of their provenance and of the fact that they were not born into that family. The adoptees, now middle-aged, keep looking back at the various traumatic experiences related to their adoption, and oscillate between a firm refusal to sympathise with their adoptive parents' ingenuousness, the inability to forgive their naivety, and profound feelings of helplessness, impotence and guilt once those elderly parents pass away. Why did their parents prefer not to engage with full explanations? What was behind their silence on the matter? Why was adoption disapproved? What did it mean not being able to engender? In what ways the adult adoptees manage to process traumatic experiences and begin healing? When the adoptees become parents, those questions take different nuances.

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Drawing on family narratives of the Holodomor, this paper explores silence as a form of care and moral navigation, showing how private knowledge of famine shaped everyday food practices and fostered critical distance from Soviet narratives across generations.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines fragmentary accounts of the Holodomor shared in intimate, private family conversations and explores how knowledge of extreme state violence was preserved within the private sphere while remaining publicly unspeakable—even in families whose adult members were institutionally embedded in the Soviet system and held positions of authority. Family silence is approached as a form of care and moral navigation in the aftermath of famine. The analysis draws on a reflexive auto-/para-ethnographic engagement with intergenerational memory in a Soviet Ukrainian family that later lived in an monolingual Russian-speaking environment.

Silence is treated as a socially productive form of silent knowledge shaping everyday practices of care, particularly around food. Practices such as hyper-care in feeding, the moralization of bread, compulsory eating, and habits of storage and conservation are analysed as embodied infrastructures through which famine memory was transmitted across generations, articulating moral contradictions between public loyalty to the state and private knowledge of its violence.

The paper traces how critical epistemic and political distance from official Soviet narratives emerged within the third generation in the late Soviet period, when long-silenced family knowledge of the Holodomor became available for reflection.

By examining everyday practices of care around food in relation to regimes of family silence and the structural embeddedness of family members within Soviet institutional and ideological contexts, the paper contributes to anthropological discussions of family secrets and silences as strategies of survival in polarized historical conditions.

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This paper examines how silence shapes the intergenerational life of nuclear history within families affected by Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakhstan.

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This paper examines how silence shapes the intergenerational life of nuclear history within families affected by Soviet nuclear testing in Kazakhstan. Based on ethnographic fieldwork near the former Semipalatinsk Test Site, it focuses on what remains unsaid about radiation, illness, and responsibility, and why such non-saying persists across generations.

Rather than treating silence as an absence of memory or knowledge, the paper approaches it as an active social, ethical, and affective practice. Family members often avoid explicit discussion of nuclear exposure, instead conveying historical knowledge through bodily memories, everyday precautions, and partial narratives. Silence allows people to manage fear, uncertainty, and stigma while sustaining family cohesion in contexts marked by unresolved harm and limited state acknowledgment. Silence also shows how do affected communities come to terms with the nuclear history.

The paper also reflects on the ethical challenges of researching histories that are intimate yet unsayable. It asks when anthropological attention to silence can deepen understanding, and when probing risks disrupting fragile forms of care. By viewing silence as a meaningful mode of historical engagement rather than absence, the paper contributes to anthropological debates on memory, secrecy, and intergenerational transmission, showing how communities live with unfinished and politically sensitive histories.

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This paper explores the enduring links between mental health and memory (collective and individual) through an analysis of silences, meaning, practice, and representation in Portugal after the end of the anti-colonial wars.

Paper long abstract

Portugal was engaged in three theatres of war in Africa from 1961 to 1974. Nearly one million men were mobilized to fight. Upon return, especially in the aftermath of the 1974 revolution and the rapid political changes taking place in Portugal, the experiences of these men and their families were silenced or left unacknowledged. The silence gave way to a renewed interest and reflection on the colonial period, its legacies, afterlives, and memories.

This paper considers the traumatic war experience to interrogate how silences are interconnected with the temporalities of care and illness trajectories in Portugal. I will explore the enduring links between mental health and memory (collective and individual) through an analysis of silences, meaning, practice, and representation after the end of the anti-colonial wars. The intersections between communal and individual processes of memory and remembrance allow us to explore the unsaid, the alluded to, and their different meanings within families and across generations. Drawing upon ethnographic research on the history of combat trauma in Portugal, I will interrogate how soldiers and their families articulate or silence memories of the anti-colonial wars. I will highlight the temporality of silence, secrecy, visibility, and openness and the interplay between imagined, and hoped for, futures and present realities. The narrative expression of war memories or its absence highlights concurrent, if contradictory and ambiguous, images – victim, warrior, hero (Sorensen 2015), villain, or perpetrator, that emerge with distinctive moral meanings and affective dimensions.

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This paper examines the racial and gender dynamics, which have made the existence of Japanese Indo-European children born of war a family secret. Their stories highlight the impact of family silences, as well as the emancipatory effect of counternarratives which challenge community memories of WWII.

Paper long abstract

The existence of Japanese Indo-European children born of war has long been a taboo within the Indo-European community in the Netherlands: born between 1944 and 1946 to Indo-European (Dutch-Indonesian) mothers and Japanese men who were members of the Japanese Occupation of the Dutch East Indies, their existence has been associated with the brutality and suffering inflicted by Japan on the Dutch community. Raised in communities deeply affected by war, it was only in the 1980s that JINers, as they call themselves, stepped into the public. While their primary goal has been to form a community and search for their biological fathers in Japan, their stories also challenge the wartime narratives that have made it difficult for mothers to tell the story of their conception. Based on 25 life story interviews and ethnographic research with JINers in the Netherlands, this paper explores the community and family dynamics that have made the existence of JINers a family secret. Their stories not only reveal the consequences of racialized images of Japan on children born of war, but also the emancipatory impact of discovering their roots, and alternative perspectives on the circumstances of their birth. They highlight the gender dimensions of wartime narratives, which confine women’s experience to victimhood or treason, and make their sexuality an object of a struggle among men. JINers’ counternarratives provide a window on the racial and gender dimensions of family and community memories and the meaning and significance of changing the narrative for war children’s well-being and identity formation.

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This presentation is a multilayered auto/ethnographic exploration of postmemory research that started in 2009 as an intervention into transgenerational silence in the aftermath of the violence of the Khmer Rouge and civil war in Cambodia.

Paper long abstract

This presentation is a multilayered auto/ethnographic exploration of postmemory research that started in 2009 as an intervention into transgenerational silence in the aftermath of the violence of the Khmer Rouge and civil war in Cambodia. By looking at both, postmemory in my own German family where I grew up without any contact to my Cambodian side and postmemory among young research partners in Cambodia, I highlight the different ways in which silence frames both settings and is socio-culturally embedded. My research on memory and violence in Cambodia interrupted my family’s silence that was marked by avoidance and active forgetting. My memory research that took place in collaboration with a Cambodian Youth NGO and young people in Cambodia, on the other hand, interrupted a transgenerational silence, that was marked by a)silence that enabled the co-existence of survivors who were marked by shifting victim-perpetrator subjectivities, b) silent material witnesses such as exhumed and displayed human remains from former mass graves in Cambodia and c) Buddhist merit-making ceremonies for the dead. Thus, silence in Cambodia did not mean the absence of memory, but it also did not transmit much information about the past. My research intervened into both, the German and the Cambodian context. Methodologically and analytical these processes at work called for an ongoing reflection and almost a *purification* between my own and my research partners’ contexts and meaning making to avoid a euro-centric bias what silence in transgenerational remembrance may mean and what it transmits.

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Italian-speaking communities in Istria responded to postwar marginalization with silence. This presentation explores how saltmaking heritage in the town of Piran transforms that silence into curated nostalgia, as family secrets partially surface through idealized memories of the saltworks.

Paper long abstract

The silence of Italian-speaking inhabitants of Istrian towns has been interpreted as a coping mechanism of a community marginalized by the Yugoslav state and the Slavic-speaking majority after World War II (Hrobat Virloget 2023). By 1956, many Italian speakers had left their homes for Italy, while a minority remained and were compelled to forge new lives. The bitter postwar decades have largely gone unaddressed and are little known to later generations of Istrians. I argue, however, that their sense of historical injustice did not remain entirely submerged.

Over the past two decades, saltmaking heritage has emerged as a prominent mode of cultural expression within the community. Piran’s Italian community established the association La Famea (“the family”) to promote a nostalgic representation of salt production in the nearby salt fields. My ethnography-based research shows that narratives of life in the former saltworks are deliberately constructed and strikingly affirmative, replete with aestheticized imagery that casts the saltworks as a “fantasy,” a “dream,” or a place “full of life.” These recollections transform the past into an idealized “lost paradise” marked by social cohesion and solidarity. Widely curated and circulated through publications and commemorative events, this heritage demonstrates that the memory of saltmaking is actively produced and shared. Salt production constitutes a selectively foregrounded past through which community members engage an otherwise reticent history and articulate a shared sense of belonging. My aim is to closely examine family secrets and silences that partially surface in relation to salt production, yet remain entirely unspoken.

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Drawing on a seven-year autoethnographic film, this paper explores familial silence, bodily memory, and collective witnessing. It argues that dwelling with silence through embodied listening offers ethical possibilities for dialogue, care, and repair in polarised familial and social worlds.

Paper long abstract

This paper reflects on Liminality, a seven-year autoethnographic documentary project that emerged from an attempt to understand gendered violence, intergenerational suffering, and the politics of silence within my own family. What began as an outward-looking inquiry into gender liminality and queer life-worlds in Germany gradually turned inward, as the camera’s gaze came to rest on my own body, my sibling, and the intimate terrains of family history. This turn emerged through an encounter with the limits of representation, when pain, silence, and unspoken histories could no longer be positioned as external to the researcher.

Filmed across India and Germany, Liminality is a film I have lived through as much as one I made, where filmmaking itself mediates encounters that might otherwise have remained confrontational. The paper explores embodied storytelling as method, foregrounding how non-verbal, sensorial, and affective dimensions of familial silence can be engaged when language proves insufficient.

This paper attends to what unfolded after the making of the film at invitation-based community screenings in Berlin, Delhi, Goa, and Mumbai. In these intimate, non-public settings. These encounters transformed the film from a personal narrative into what I conceptualise as collective witnessing: a relational space in which silence is not resolved through revelation alone, but held through sustained, attentive listening. Thereby, I argue that autoethnography, when situated within collective and dialogic encounters, offers a fragile yet generative condition for dialogue, care, and collective repair across polarised familial and social terrains.

Trailer: vimeo.com/1128695996/56e1323e5c