Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for the Anthropology of Religion

Of interest to: Practicing and Applied Anthropologists, Teachers of Anthropology in Community Colleges, Students, Those Involved in Mentoring Activities

Primary Theme: Resilience

Secondary Theme: Social movements

(2-0485) Uncertain Power: Silence as Generative Ambiguity

Notoriously difficult to interpret, sociocultural silences can spring from complex agencies, multivocal webs of meaning, and generative ambiguities. Much recent anthropology on silence explores its relationship to trauma (e.g., Das 2007). This panel instead expands the topic to address varieties of silence that include intentional indeterminacies, what Michael Jackson (2013) called “the uncertainty principle,” which bring the creative power of ambiguity into the play of diverse lifeworlds. Such silences are dynamic, prompting both cultural actors and ethnographers to participate in unknown and unknowable fields of generative power. Whether the ethnographic contexts are the intentional American Christian monastic silences that serve to unhinge ordinary perception through the exploration of communal inner space, new possibilities expressed in Chinese hauntings and ritual silences in response to enforced urban displacement, or persistent ethnographic attempts at understanding the juncture of silences and sounds in a Ghanaian ritual sonic habitat, sociocultural silences can act as fruitful catalysts for renewal and reconfiguration of known worlds.

Das, Veena. 2007. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: University of California Press
Jackson, Michael. 2013. Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Organizer(s)

• Paula Pryce

  Honorary SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow
  University of British Columbia

Chair(s)

• Paula Pryce

  Honorary SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow
  University of British Columbia

Presenter(s)

• Paula Pryce

  Honorary SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow
  University of British Columbia

Organizer(s)

• Robert Weller

  Professor
  Boston University

Presenter(s)

• Robert Weller

  Professor
  Boston University

Discussant(s)

• Annemarie Samuels

  Assistant Professor
  Leiden University

• Ana Dragojlovic

  Lecturer in Gender Studies
  University of Melbourne

Presenter(s)

• Mariam Goshadze

  Harvard University

• Jason Brown

  Sessional Instructor
  Simon Fraser University

Presentations:

• 2:15 PM - 2:30 PM

  “Silence of Being”: Intentional Ambiguity and the Contemplation of Everyday Life among Inter-religious Practitioners of Centering Prayer
  Paula Pryce – University of British Columbia
• 2:30 PM - 2:45 PM

  On Longing and Rhythm: Recuperating Silence in an Age of Bulldozers
  Robert P. Weller – Boston University
• 2:45 PM - 3:00 PM

  The Noise Silence Makes: Kplejoo Festival and the Sonic Whims of Ga Deities
  Mariam Goshadze – Harvard University
• 3:00 PM - 3:15 PM

  The Space Between: the Phenomenology of Silence among Roman Catholic Monastics of the American West
  Jason M. Brown – Simon Fraser University
• 3:15 PM - 3:30 PM

  Discussion
  Annemarie Samuels – Leiden University
• 3:30 PM - 3:45 PM

  Discussion
  Ana Dragojlovic – University of Melbourne