Short Abstract:

The panel addresses the question of how to write the untellable when ethnologists are faced with silence. The aim is to compare and offer ethnographic methodological tools to grasp and understand the heterogeneity of silence(s) and to build the basis for a comparative ethnography of silence(s).

Long Abstract:

Silence does not only encompass an absence of a speech or voice, but it can be a strong medium of communication. It can be filled with words, affects and emotions, enclosed in bodily memory practices or embodied memory. In ethnographic research, silence is influenced by the research position. However, ethnologists are not trained to research silence.

Scholars of collective memory have given attention to representations of the past and its silences, omissions, connected to memorial conflicts. Silence can be connected to repression, when individuals bury traumatic, painful memories in the subconscious. In this case we could speak about trauma or trans-generational trauma as an inability of verbalisation and narration. In a cross-cultural comparison silence can be linked to the concept of historical trauma of indigenous groups. However, silence can be triggered by more recent causal factors of structural violence, inequality, and other ongoing forms of material dispossession and political domination. Silence can be the consequence of ethnic, national, political, class-based and colonial violence, a traumatic experience which can be studied in relation to structural violence or social suffering. It can be explored in the direction of phenomenology and within the framework of affect theory by examining how silences are embodied and mediate emotions and feelings. Avoiding a universalizing and homogenising categorization of silence and reflecting on the different roles of silences in individual and social contexts the panel aims to methodologically grasp silence in its diverse aspects, to understand silence(s) and study methods of its exploration and interpretation.

This Panel has so far received 7 paper proposal(s).
Propose paper