Etnography of Silence(s)

ETHNOGRAPHY OF SILENCE(S) The project stems from the experience of researchers who encountered silence during their fieldwork. It derives from methodological questions they have dealt with when encountering people pervaded by an omnipresent silence. The project will challenge the methodological and interpretative frameworks of studying silence in ethnography and will focus on the questions of how to research detect, react to, study, and interpret silence. These questions will be studied through ethnographic research of communities whose collective identity is not based only on shared memories, as Halbwachs (1980) would argue, but also on collective silence. The project case-studies are silences on the “Istrian exodus”, massive migrations of (mainly) Italians from Yugoslavia, in different related communities in Istria in Slovenia and abroad, silences of the Slovenian minority in Austria and Italy, of politically oppressed groups during socialist times in Yugoslavia, groups facing marginalization in new economic conditions of post-socialist/capitalist Slovenia. Furthermore, silence of Native Americans provides similar yet different comparative aspect to the phenomenon outside the European context. All these silences can be understood as a consequence of ethnic, national, political, class and colonial violence and as a result of different non-articulated traumatic experiences. The project aims to understand silence(s) and explore methodologies of its research and interpretations. Silence does not only encompass an absence of a speech or a voice, but is also an action or strong medium of communication. Varieties of silence include keeping silent, concealing, silencing oneself etc. Silence can be filled with words, affects and emotions, enclosed in bodily memory practices or embodied memory. However, ethnologists are not trained to detect, observe, analyze and interpret silence. This motivates this project to focus on questions of how to study silence(s) and explore the effects of such studies through ethnographic studies of some representative communities, and not to provide thorough accounts of traumatic events that silenced them. But in contrast to psychotherapy and other sciences focusing on the individuals and their traumas, the researchers do not want to medicalize and pathologize silences, but study collective silence(s) caused by the communities’ traumatic experiences. Existing studies show that ethnography can be a reliable tool to tap into silence without forcing people to acknowledge and clinically process their traumas. In order to methodologically grasp silence, the project has been conceived in two main phases. The first phase focuses on the methodology. By conducting ethnographies of silence, we aim to understand how to detect, analyze and research silence in ethnology, how to understand the varieties of silence, the message it conveys and its role in the individual and social context. The second phase focuses on the representations of silence(s). It relies on studying the effects of the articulation of silence(s) in order to understand how or by which mechanisms silence can be articulated, and to comprehend the effects or the consequences that the articulation of silence has for the individuals and groups. Speaking in classical ethnological terms: what happens when voice is given to the silenced groups? Silence can be articulated by different actions, from arts, politics to ethnological research etc. The final aim is to build the basis for a comparative ethnography of silence(s). The novelty of the project is to offer ethnographic methodological tools to grasp and understand the heterogeneity of silence(s). It also expects to make a significant social impact by giving voice to the silenced and observing the effects of such endeavors.