Contemporary anthropology prides itself on its capacity to “give voice” to silenced or marginalized groups (Fernandez 1987). These claims are counter-balanced by anthropological inquiries into the extractive and potentially exploitative nature of ethnography, or what Whitehead (2013, 27) refers to as the “unsilencing of others” (see also Cuéllar 2005; O’Connell Davidson 2008; Razack 1993; Simpson 2007). But despite such concerns, the predominant view remains that anthropology’s capacity to “give voice” — or, to borrow Portelli’s term, to “amplify” the voices of others — remains one of its most important contributions.
A similar attention to voice is found in adjacent fields, namely conflict studies and gender studies. In conflict studies, especially where it overlaps with anthropology, extreme suffering is often conceptualized as loss of voice (Morris 1996), gesturing to the way that trauma can render people unable to articulate their experiences (D. E. Goldstein 2012; Scarry 1987; Warin and Dennis 2008). Reflecting the current “age of transitional justice” (Adler 2018; Bernath 2016; Moffett 2016), in which the right of victims to have their experiences recognized is considered paramount (Govier 2003; Haldemann 2008), the idea of “breaking the silence” is associated with moving forward and healing divided communities (Last 2000; Russell 2019). Yet scholars have also taken note of the silence that comes with research fatigue, and they have begun to challenge the disciplinary landscape in which victims of violence are called upon to vocalize their experiences over and over again (Boesten and Henry 2018; Finnström 2015).
Feminist writing on silence and voice exhibits a similar tension. Scholars have argued that in a world where women are so often silenced, it is important to learn to listen to women’s voices through their very silences, or what Anderson and Jack (1991, 11) refer to as the “muted channel of women’s subjectivity” (see also Di Lellio 2016; Ryan-Flood and Gill 2010; Srigley, Zembrzycki, and Iacovetta 2018; Visweswaran 1994). Attending with care to hesitations, evasions, and the “gaps between fragile words” (Ross 2003, 50), feminist scholars have excavated gendered narratives that would otherwise have remained unheard. Altınay and Pető (2016, 3) refer to this body of work as “feminist unsilencing projects” (3), noting the importance of critically interrogating which stories feminist academics choose to unsilence, and which they do not: “As Catherine Lutz succinctly puts it, ‘feminist margins have their own margins’” (Altınay and Pető 2016, 9; citing Lutz 1995, 251). However, the sense of mining for meaning in the unspoken finds a counterweight in work that respects the boundaries drawn by silent subjects, and that refuses to pry. Das (2007), for example, has challenged the too-easy equation of voice with empowerment, and has argued that the decision to remain silent can itself be a form of agency after violence (Jackson 2004; N. Mookherjee 2015; Parpart 2010; Ross 2003; Saikia 2011)
Across each of these fields, the tense interplay between amplifying voices and respecting silences is palpable. But whether speaking or silent, whether amplified or
suppressed, the common assumption across all these fields is the same: the voices of victims or marginalized groups may testify or bear witness to violence, but, like pure victims, they will not harm.
The first hidden transcript fit easily into the assumptions of the above literature; the “awkwardness” of my research became apparent only with the emergence of the second hidden transcript. It became awkward as victim-narrators (like the woman who changed her tune after nine months) suddenly strayed from the accepted “genre” of survivor testimony (see Chakravarti 2014; Kindersley 2015; Morris 1996; Niezen 2013; Reynaud 2014; Ure 2008), and began to show degrees of complicity. Fujii (2009, 36) describes a similar moment of disorientation in her fieldwork in Rwanda, when she interviewed a Tutsi genocide survivor who she assumed, based on his status, would have “nothing to hide,” but who turned out to have been implicated in the genocide as an informant.
The expectation is that “giving voice” or “breaking the silence” will bring to light individual truths that run counter to dominant, state-sanctioned versions of history. But, as Altınay and Pető (2016, 12) warn, there is a danger in “celebrat[ing] all forms of unsilencing as equally progressive.” How to respond when those speaking vocalize not only their own experiential truth, but also the harmful competing rhetoric of another government (or statelet)? When they recite a suppressed narrative that is dominant
elsewhere, and that itself suppresses and silences other victims?
The awkward fit of the second hidden transcript is visible on multiple levels. The same blending of personal and political that makes the second transcript so insidious is a quality that is more easily celebrated in the narratives of other (more morally favourable) suppressed groups. Sugiman (2004) acknowledges the powerful weaving of personal and political in the narratives of Japanese women who experienced internment. Ackerman (2019, 77) describes how “personal narratives become embedded in a political voice,” enabling those who have suffered to speak politically through their own experiences. And Dossa (2014) notes that through the strategic use of “we-language” in their narratives of violence, Afghani women speak in a politicized voice that extends beyond their own
experiences of violence to encompass and elevate the experiences of other Afghani women, and of all Afghanis affected by war (see also Crapanzano 2011).
When those speaking are morally distant, when they share a measure of complicity, the assumptions and imperatives of the literature fail to hold. For instance, a critical component of the anthropologists’ (and oral historians’) imperative to “give voice” is the concept of sharing authority: of recognizing our research participants as experts of their own experiences, and repositioning ourselves as students who are willing to learn. This imperative is often problematic in practice — as Kindersley (2015) points, claims of “giving voice” and “sharing authority” are rarely accompanied by actually sharing
authorship — but it is even more fraught when research participants are members of
“unloved” groups (Fielding 1990, 608; Lee 1995, 25),, as sharing authority effectively provides a platform for their political views.
The solution, as I see it, is not to vocalize the first transcript and bracket out the second. This would be to turn off the microphone once the victim strays from the expected script. Instead, we might ask how our disciplinary conventions shape and delimit the narratives of our research participants (see Kindersley 2015). Anthropologists have begun to critique the dark subject matter of the discipline, and the overwhelming focus on human suffering and misery (Kelly 2013a; Ortner 2016; Robbins 2013; Thin 2009). What is still needed is a critical interrogation of the way we have conflated suffering with moral good (see Helms 2013; Enns 2012), a conflation that is revealed in our norms of research and representation, and their awkward fit for impure or complex victims.