B022: Silence, Solitude, and Social Change in Contemporary Asia

Organizer(s)

• 

  Merav Shohet

  Boston University, United States

Chair(s)

• 

  Merav Shohet

  Boston University, United States

Paper Presenter(s)

• 

  Merav Shohet

  Boston University, United States
• 

  Fathimath Anan (Anu) Ahmed

  Boston University, Maldives
• AS

  Annemarie Samuels

  Leiden University, Netherlands
• RW

  Robert Weller

  Boston University, United States

Discussant(s)

• NH

  Nicholas Harkness

  Harvard University, United States

Session Abstract: Recent decades have witnessed both dramatic economic growth and the resurgence of repression and exclusion in many Asian countries. How do community members in different contexts grapple with social changes brought about by revolutionizing or reforming policies, particularly as regards to gender, health, or the practice of religion? What role does silence play and what are its contours? How do stereotypes of Asian families and states as collectivist or authoritarian figure in the production of particular types of silences, or alternatively, dissimulative speech? Following Derrida’s (1978) and Foucault’s (1978) insights that there are different kinds of silences and that such silences render speech possible and interpretable, panelists will investigate the different types of tactics by which people enact silence while uttering words and performatively engaging in day-to-day activities. Drawing on their fieldwork in Vietnam, the Maldives, Indonesia, China, and Korea, papers and synthesizing discussion comments will further comparatively examine silence in relation to solitude and social change and seek commonalities and the points of difference across different urbanizing Asian locales. In particular, papers will attend to how various narrative forms or ritual performances overcome or underscore silence, sometimes by ambivalently protecting while also harming those involved in producing silence. Collectively, contributors will ask whether certain tactics of silence entail solitude for those who are silenced or silence themselves and interrogate the meanings of solitude for the different actors involved.

Presentations:

• Gossip and Silence, Discipline and Release in Market-socialist Vietnam
  

  Paper Presenter: Merav Shohet – Boston University
• Exploring Silences in an Emerging Culture of Giving Trauma Testimony in Male’, Maldives
  

  Paper Presenter: Fathimath Anan (Anu) Ahmed – Boston University
• Silence at the end of life: multivocality at the edges of narrative possibility
  

  Paper Presenter: Annemarie Samuels – Leiden University
• Silence, Censorship, and the Three Deaths of Fengzhen
  

  Paper Presenter: Robert Weller – Boston University