This special issue of the Journal of Anthropological Research stems from a session on “Omissions and Silences in Anthropological Fieldwork: Revisiting Earlier Research” at the 2018 American Anthropological Association meeting in San Jose and gives testament to the vitality of the Association of Senior Anthropologists which sponsored it. All our contributors share a belief in the inevitability of silence in fieldwork given the multiplicity of intentions, orientations, tasks, and avenues of access it involves. Yet all of them display a degree of contrition or annoyance for the particular silences they see as having marred their own fieldwork. Whether by means of avoidance, omission, or suppression, they show us how the knowledge they have derived from fieldwork was shaped by the various silences in which it was embedded. This special issue touches on a central problem for the theoretical understanding of silence. It permits us to reflect on silence’s role in the acquisition of knowledge— namely, the condition of silence as constant presence construed as ultimate absence. Silence can be described as the ground for meaning formation where potentiality and negativity intersect, marking or concealing different aspects of experience. It is a concept made necessary by the subliminal understanding of the fluidity of reality intimated by observations as disparate in time as Heraclitus’ philosophical musings and quantum physics analyses. I argue that silence is the concept we have devised in order to trust that our instances of experience are discrete entities, rather than arbitrary sectioning of a fluid reality. We may be immersed in flux, but we experience reality as a system or a process that can be bounded: from the sound up. Even as primary an experience as sound perception is achieved by omitting much of what we hear but do not consider significant. In speech, this is clear if we consider the identification of phonemes out of unbounded phonic variation, an activity that is both universal and language-specific. Similarly, music is

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沉默/显着、流动的现实和田野工作的前景：特刊简介

本期《人类学研究杂志》特刊源于 2018 年在圣何塞举行的美国人类学协会会议上关于“人类学田野工作中的遗漏和沉默：重新审视早期研究”的会议，并证明了赞助的高级人类学家协会的活力它。鉴于其涉及的意图、方向、任务和访问途径的多样性，我们所有的贡献者都相信在田野工作中沉默是不可避免的。然而，他们所有人都对他们认为破坏了他们自己的田野工作的特殊沉默表示了一定程度的悔恨或烦恼。无论是通过回避、遗漏还是压制，他们向我们展示了他们从田野工作中获得的知识是如何被嵌入其中的各种沉默所塑造的。本期特刊触及了对沉默的理论理解的一个核心问题。它允许我们反思沉默在获取知识中的作用——即，沉默作为持续在场的条件被解释为最终的不在场。沉默可以被描述为意义形成的基础，其中潜在性和消极性交叉，标记或隐藏了经验的不同方面。对现实的流动性的潜意识理解使这个概念变得必要，而观察所暗示的观察与赫拉克利特的哲学思考和量子物理学分析在时间上是不同的。我认为沉默是我们设计的概念，目的是相信我们的经验实例是离散的实体，而不是对流动现实的任意分割。我们可能沉浸在潮汐中，但我们将现实体验为一个系统或一个可以有界的过程：从声音开始。即使是像声音感知这样的初级体验，也是通过省略我们听到但不认为重要的大部分内容来实现的。在语音中，如果我们考虑从无界的语音变化中识别音素，这一点就很清楚了，这是一种既普遍又特定于语言的活动。同样，音乐是