Robert P Weller

I am proposing to complete a book manuscript tentatively called Angles of Silence: Toward an Anthropology of the Unknowable. Building on a decade of research, the book takes an innovative approach to silence, building off the interplay between silence’s opacity to interpretation and its fundamental sociality. Each chapter takes a different angle on silence, drawing on a combination of field research (mostly from China and Taiwan) and personal history, and including topics like censorship, rhythm and ritual, death, and haunting. The book as a whole argues for the need to take silence seriously despite the difficult methodological questions involved; it challenges the confidence with which much scholarship in the social sciences and humanities instead imposes its own interpretations on silence.