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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.

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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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This paper examines intergenerational transmission of memories among Georgian families from Abkhazia in Moscow – with a focus on what creative methods can contribute to the anthropological work with silence, as well as on postmemory’s role in second-generation senses of belonging.

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This paper explores the intergenerational transmission of memories and imaginations of home among Georgian families who fled the war in Abkhazia in the 1990s and settled in Moscow. Despite more than 30 years having passed, conversations about Abkhazia continue among the displaced, and this topic remains profoundly painful. Most of these families either cannot return to Abkhazia or choose not to, given the current political situation. Thus, young people learn about their homeland through their parents’ and grandparents’ recollections and longing, intermingled with socially and politically constructed narratives of historical and current events related to the unresolved conflict. However, they also learn from silence as this is a topic not spoken aloud in Moscow and although often discussed within the families – circulating around recurring nostalgic narratives, leaving gaps of silence and silencing.

While conducting my PhD fieldwork on senses of belonging among young people of Georgian origin in Moscow in 2021-2022, I constantly encountered these silenced spots. In this paper, through focusing on a creative workshop I designed for young people, I discuss how anthropology can work with silence through visual methods, and how unspeakable postmemory — alongside their parents' repeating nostalgic stories — seems to create intragenerational bonding among second-generation migrants that affects their senses of belonging.

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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.

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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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Using autoethnography, this paper analyses how silences around Nazism and Francoism are produced through everyday family routines and interactional norms. It shows how emotional discipline and gendered hierarchies shape moral memory, subjectivity, and intergenerational polarization.

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This paper uses autoethnography to analyse how family secrets and silences structure emotional expression, moral memory, and intergenerational polarization in a German–Spanish family shaped by the afterlives of Nazism and Francoism. The focus is not on silence as an absence of speech, but on silence as a social practice and normative order that regulates what can be named, felt, and processed.

Empirically, the paper draws on selected autobiographical episodes that reveal the micro-politics of silence: routinised forms of control and accountability, the management of conflict through avoidance, the displacement of tension into humour, and the gendered distribution of care and responsibility. These practices produced an “emotional regime” in which fear, guilt, shame, and anger were present but rarely articulated, while parental authority and gendered power relations were stabilised through implicit expectations rather than explicit discussion.

The paper mobilises perspectives from affect theory, feminist anthropology, and memory studies to conceptualise silence as an embodied archive and a moral infrastructure through which authoritarian histories persist in family life. It argues that intergenerational transmission operates not only through narrative content (what is told or withheld), but through habitualised interactional forms that shape subjectivity and capacity for recognition.

Finally, the paper reflects on methodological and ethical implications of autoethnographic disclosure. Making the unsaid analytically visible may enable recognition and dialogue, yet it also entails risks of relational harm and renewed conflict. The paper contributes to debates on secrecy, affect, ethics, and the potential and limits of anthropology in engaging familial histories in polarised contexts.

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This paper traces the impact of secrets and silences surrounding perpetration and war experiences in neo-Fascist families in Italy from an intergenerational perspective. It analysis intergenerational transmissions of silenced perpetratorship, asking also how the researcher may affect these dynamics.

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The proposed contribution examines the impact of secrets and silences surrounding perpetration and wartime experiences in Fascist families from an intergenerational perspective. It focuses on families within Italian neo-fascism, analysing the connections and interdependencies between the generation of Fascists active under the Mussolini regime (1925–1945) and their children, many of whom later became neo-fascist activists during the so-called Years of Lead (1970s–1980s), a period marked by political polarization and terror.

Many descendants of Fascist families share the experience of having been raised in households where fathers were portrayed as heroes and victims of the Second World War, particularly of violence committed by Italian partisans during the Italian Civil War (1943–1945). More broadly, Fascist veterans mostly silenced their own war experiences and acts of perpetration in favour of a shared narrative of victimhood that became central to post-war neo-fascist identity formation. Close-knit family structures, and the strong ties and dependencies they entail, have hindered children’s ability to critically engage with their parents’ pasts. Moreover, dominant public anti-Fascist discourses have paradoxically reinforced familial solidarity and alignment with parental worldviews, contributing to the preservation of a cohesive family identity.

By zooming in on Fascist families, this contribution traces the effects of silenced perpetration and examines the mechanisms and dynamics of intergenerational transmission, drawing on insights from psychological theory. In doing so, it also reflects on how anthropological research itself may impact such dynamics—particularly through the investigation of difficult pasts and the potentially unsettling presence of the ethnographer.

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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.

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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. 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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This paper examines the suicide of a young man in northern Benin (2025), focusing on silence, fieldwork conversations, and familial conflicts linked to changing land tenure and responsibilities, and reflects on healing and the ethical intensity of long-term ethnographic research.

Paper long abstract

This paper reconstructs contexts and perceived reasons surrounding the suicide of a young man in northern Benin, which occurred unexpectedly in my long-term field site in 2025 and profoundly affected both myself and my research partners. Ousmane had been regarded as a successful agriculturalist assuming responsibility for his household and guiding his family through periods of transformation. His suicide abruptly shattered this image—one I had also previously shared.

The event generated a situation of helplessness and was initially met with multiple forms of communicative silence. These included refusal to speculate about the reasons for the suicide, commonly framed as knowledge accessible only to God; silence surrounding possible warning signs; and avoidance of discussing conflicts that may have contributed to his death. However, my return to the field—by chance a few weeks after Ousmane’s death—and my thirty-year familiarity with him and many of his kin facilitated conversations that gradually transformed this silence. In these exchanges, both my interlocutors and I began to reflect collectively on the event.

The paper analyzes these conversations, the silences they addressed, and their potential for healing. It examines deep-seated familial conflicts that appear to have played a role in the suicide, emerging in the context of accelerating individualization of land tenure, economic resources, and shifting family responsibilities. I argue that, in this case, overcoming silence in the field contributed to the creation of new perspectives for those affected by the loss. The paper also reflects on the emotional intensity and ethical challenges of extreme fieldwork experiences.

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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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My paper explores non-academic, artistic routes that have enabled me to narrate what remains deliberately unexposed in my family ethnography. I trace opportunities to navigate the tightrope between multivocality and writing with silence in efforts to protect family secrets.

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When anthropologists work on life projects that are part microhistory and part memoir, learning how to protect—or when necessary, break—research participants’ unspoken secrets becomes fundamental. By examining how what is left unsaid sustains both secrecy and trust as interconnected social practices, this paper outlines the challenges of probing into secrets and of knowing when to refrain from doing so. Treating my own extended family connections as a field-site, I piece together the lived experiences of my father and wider kin as a Chinese–Finnish mixed-race family living in Beijing under Mao Zedong’s rule, at a time when careful monitoring and mutual surveillance shaped everyday life. Secrets, self-enforced social forgetting, repression, and disremembering shape the biographical narratives of my family story, and of many others who grew up in this insulated environment. In my project, I am frequently confronted with silence whereby my interlocutors frequently warn me that undoing, exposing, or even naming the unspoken past can carry fatal consequences. Rather than attempting to salvage the past or awaiting the sudden exposure of the “unspoken,” this paper explores the non-academic artistic routes through performance that have enabled me to express narratives that remain deliberately unexposed. I consider how multivocality in the arts provides an avenue to both respect and protect my family secrets.

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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.

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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