Paper short abstract:

Drawing on the case of Europeans travelling to northern India to participate in ten days silent Buddhist retreats, this paper examine the ways in which people spatialize and temporalize this silent experience in its sensorial, affective, embodied, cognitive and social dimension.

Paper long abstract:

Speech - as a fundamental aspect of a human condition - is the main tool that rhythm social relations (Breton & Le Breton; 2009). It's also the main channel with which ethnographers collect their data. But what is happening beyond the horizon of speech, when words disappear (or are forbidden) and only silence remain?

Drawing on the case of Europeans travelling to northern India to participate in ten days silent Buddhist retreats, this paper examine the ways in which people spatialize and temporalize this silent experience in its sensorial, affective, embodied, cognitive and social dimension. Through a phenomenological approach, I will try to show that in the special settings of these retreat Centers - silence is not considered as a mere synonym of absence but as a multiplication of other forms of presences, as an agent of sens-making and a way of perceiving, constructing and negotiating one's inner and outer inter-subjectivities lifeworld. In addition, the proposed paper will also explore methodological and epistemological concerns on the different way to conduct an ethnography of silence.