Silence The Currency of Power [Paperback]

This book is about silence and power and how they interact. It argues that only by studying how silence workshow it is implicated in the construction of meaningcan 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.

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

Silence, says [the author], allows us to belief that the un-said is non-existent: hence the close relationship between silence and language and between silence and ideology. This research promises a radical renewal in the study and in the very way we think about the connection between silence and language.???Italian Review

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 Californias Proposition 187 and of the Confederate Battle Flag in South Carolina
Ann E. Kingsolver

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