I finished reading one of the books I bought at the AAA’s in DC last year. The book, edited by Maria-Luisa Achino-Loeb, seemed very intriguing. Once I got into it, though, I wasn’t as excited as I thought I’d be. The editor notes that this work grew out of a session on silence at the AAAs in San Francisco in 2000. Having been to quite a few sessions at the annual Anthropological Association’s meetings, I feel that the book is merely a continuing session of that theme. Sadly, I don’t mean this in a positive way.

The book is divided up into three parts: theory, ethnographic detail, and potential action. The theory reminds me of the esoteric language used by anthropologists of yore that condemn my chosen field to obscurity and ensure that anthropologists won’t play a substantial role in U.S. domestic or foreign policy. The basic theme is silence, although the different contributors have very broad understandings of this theme. Some look at silence as a concept, in and of itself. That’s what I was particularly interested in. Others see silence merely as the absence of a sustained discourse on a particular issue or problem. Granted, this is a form of silence, but seems ill-fitted to the theoretical framework that the editor introduces.

I won’t toss this book, though, due to two of the three selections of deep ethnography. Kingsolver looks at silence with respect to Proposition 187 in California and the Confederate battle flag in South Carolina. Sheriff looks at the silences surrounding racism in contemporary Brazil. Sheriff’s piece is especially timely given the riots that occurred in France at the end of 2005. Check out this book for these two entries. Otherwise, I didn’t take too much from it.