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Paper short abstract

This paper reflects on the different dynamics surrounding my potentially complicit or respectful silences that I feel compelled to engage across field sites, from Vietnam, where I am perceived as a ‘foreigner other’ to Israel, where I can pass as a ‘native insider.’

Paper long abstract

Silence is polysemous, spanning affective, moral, political, and temporal dimensions (Shohet forthcoming 2026). In this paper, I juxtapose my own and interlocutors’ silences in the field to examine these dimensions, using a phenomenological approach. I reflect on how my positionality as a neo-colonial ‘foreigner other’ during fieldwork in Vietnam, or as a ‘halfie’ or ‘native insider’ (Abu-Lughod 1991; Narayan 1993) during fieldwork in Israel, shapes the complicit or respectful silences and ‘refusals’ (Simpson 2007) I engaged in, both during fieldwork and in the ethnographic writing process. I use these reflections to discuss anthropology’s implicit hierarchies regarding who or what constitute an “appropriate” or “accepted” subject for ethnographic research. I conclude that stakeholders’ claims about academic freedom and freedom of speech may reveal more about who they believe should count as a ‘moral self’ or legitimated community, than they do about ‘silence’ and ‘silencing’ as neutral or objective entities in the world.