ABSTRACT

Silence is crucial to our social world. Responding to the growing scholarly interest among anthropologists and historians in more in-depth engagements with social silence, in this special issue we argue for a theorization of silences that is at once more robust and open to the particular; a theorization, we suggest, that embraces multivocality, unintelligibility, and uncertainty of interpretation. We ask what it means to trace silences, and to include traces of silence in our ethnographic representations. What qualifies as silence, and how does it relate to articulation; to voice, visibility and representation? How can silences be sensed and experienced viscerally as well as narratively? And how do we think with and start interpreting silences in the face of potential unknowability? The contributions to this special issue suggest that tracing silences, through a range of modes and methods, and in the historical, social and political ways in which they emerge and are enacted in the particularities of people’s lives, is a crucial task for historians and anthropologists alike.

摘要

沉默对我们的社交世界至关重要。为了回应人类学家和历史学家对更深入地研究社会沉默的学术兴趣日益增长，在这个特刊中，我们主张对沉默进行理论化，这种理论化对特定的事物更加有力和开放；我们建议，一种包含多声道性、不可理解性和解释不确定性的理论。我们询问追踪沉默意味着什么，以及在我们的人种学表征中包括沉默的痕迹。什么是沉默，它与发音有什么关系；发声，可见性和代表性？如何从内心和叙事上感知和体验沉默？面对潜在的不可知性，我们如何思考并开始解释沉默？对本特刊的贡献表明，通过一系列模式和方法，以及在人们生活的特殊性中以历史、社会和政治方式出现和制定沉默，追踪沉默是历史学家和人类学家的一项重要任务。一样。