Silence: the currency of power

This book is about silence and power and how they interact. It argues that only by studying how silence works—how it is implicated in the construction of meaning—can we arrive at the elusive roots of power in all its dimensions. Silence becomes the currency of power by delineating the margins or what we perceive and through a sleight of hand wherein behaviors undertaken in the service of self-interest appear instead as inevitable and devoid of human agency. The theoretical load of this argument is carried by vivid ethnographic material dealing with music, linguistic behavior, racial conflicts, work dislocations, and the construction of anthropological subjects and texts

Introduction: Silence as the Currency of Power; Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb PART I: SILENCE, CONTEXT, AND CATEGORIES OF IDENTITY Chapter 1. Silence in Music; William O. Beeman Chapter 2. Silence and the Imperatives of Identity; Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb Chapter 3. Language Policies and the Erasure of Multilingualism in South Africa; Susan E. Cook PART II: SILENCE AND POWER IN ETHNOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVE Chapter 4. Strategic Alterity and Silence in the Promotion of California's Proposition 187 and of the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina; Ann E. Kingsolver Chapter 5. No/ma(i)ds: Silenced Subjects in Philippine Migration; Pauline Gardiner Barber Chapter 6. The Muzzled Saint: Racism, Cultural Censorship, and Religion in Urban Brazil; Robin E. Sheriff PART III: SILENCE AND THE PLIGHT OF THE OBSERVER Chapter 7. Between Silences and Culture: A Partisan Anthropology; Gerald Sider Chapter 8. Silences of the Field; James W. Fernandez Contributors; Author Index; Subject Index