Silence Sits in Places

Abstract

Having become interested in the uprising of the Hirak movement and its denouncement of a 'cancer epidemic' in the Moroccan Rif, I ended up having what appeared to be a shattered experience, one broken by refusals to speak, miscommunication and bureaucratic barriers. Upon returning home, the very same silence that had surrounded my fieldwork then emerged as a resourceful tool with which to make sense of an opaque history. In this article, I will therefore consider silence as a social object that we encounter during fieldwork, as a positional issue and as an epistemological space. In this sense, engaging with what appears to be at the margin of everyday speech requires consideration of silence as something that is made powerful precisely by its being left unsaid.