Silence Sits in Places

Federico Reginato

doi:10.3167/aia.2021.280204

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.

Highlights

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 sha ered experience, one broken by refusals to speak, miscommunication and bureaucratic barriers
During my first foray into the field in Morocco, where I conducted work on the relations between colonial history, health politics and social representations in the Rif,1 the two above-mentioned questions came into being, and they were embodied in the discourses with my interlocutors
The social movement appeared in the media and in debates as an effective solution par le bas capable of giving voice to those who were ‘unable to speak’, like the subalterns of Antonio Gramsci (1977) and Gayatri Spivak (1988): as a response to the epidemiological absence of data, Rifan political associations and the Hirak movement mobilised ‘circumstantial’ knowledges (Ginzburg 1986) and ‘tactics’ (De Certeau 2006) by cross-referencing different sets of aetiological data from the paediatric hospital and from all the hospital centres in which the provenance of patients was indicated, and by presenting the results of the autonomous research conducted by association members, European historians and European anthropologists

Summary

Introduction

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 sha ered experience, one broken by refusals to speak, miscommunication and bureaucratic barriers. During my first foray into the field in Morocco, where I conducted work on the relations between colonial history, health politics and social representations in the Rif,1 the two above-mentioned questions came into being, and they were embodied in the discourses with my interlocutors.

Results

Conclusion