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Anthropology Texts for TeachingSILENCE
The Currency Of Power
Edited by Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb
| 168 pages, bibliog, index ISBN 978-1-84545-131-8 Pb $22.50/£13.50 Published ( 2005) ISBN 978-1-84545-130-1 Hb $70.00/£42.00 Published ( 2005) Buy now and get 15% off listed price |
“The overall message and demonstration that silences are heterogeneous and essential formations within cultural meaning is an important contribution to scholarship on power.” · American Ethnologist
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.
Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb, PhD, teaches at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Studies where she continues to develop courses on silence. She has done research with Waldensians and other minorities within religious groups. Her work has been published in journals such as American Anthropologist and Theory in Psychology, among others. She currently co-chairs the Advisory Council of the Anthropology Section, New York Academy of Sciences.
Contents
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