Towards an Anthropological Appreciation of Silence as an Ethnographic Key: Homely, Instrumental, Ethical

Abstract

The chapter concerns the ambition to do justice anthropologically to silence, understood as forming a key component of individual identity and social interaction. One might consider social anthropology to be the study of the effects that human beings as individual, energetic things-in-the-world have upon one another. These effects will often be inadvertent, as individuals’ distinct and often incommensurate worldviews and life-projects come into contact via institutions of social structure. This chapter extends these effects to include silence: both the individual who is silent to themselves and the individual who is silent to others. In particular, the chapter explores the homeliness of silence and its solitudinousness; also how silence is painful, how silence is a privilege, and the ethics of granting others a space of silence.