The Language of Silence

Silence is polysemous, spanning affective, moral, political, and temporal dimensions. Typically defined as an absence (of sound, speech, or language), silence is also a presence and a material sign. This selective review of anthropological scholarship engaged with silence argues that, as an inherently contextual and cultural semiotic form, silence bears the signature features of any speech or listening act: It evokes a multiplicity of effects not necessarily known in advance. I highlight some of the meanings attached to being silenced or staying silent to show that while it may remain common to theorize silence in binary framings (e.g., silence/voice, victims/perpetrators, or oppression/resistance), another productive direction involves unsettling such rigid boundaries and framings. Using linguistic anthropological methods attuned to how different forms of silence intertwine with various genres of sociality and discursive or narrative forms, this review examines how silences are produced, enforced, challenged, or recast, by whom, and why.