The Socio-cultural Filters of Silences

Abstract

AbstractSilence is subject to culturally specific social practices that encourage it or covertly override speech. For example, Buddhism’s emphasis on the ineffable repudiates the duality of speech and non-speech by extolling emptiness, ambiguity, and meaning beyond language as the path to enlightenment. Individualism, the transmission of spiritual values, and the ontological challenging of boundaries are its political dimensions. In other forms of social activity, practices of silence are embedded in boundary crossing between worship and the secular. The seven modalities of Chapter 7 are revisited in social contexts concerning taboos; the inherent suspicion of silences; linguistic evasion and euphemisms; the unnoticeability of minorities; and the cultural propensity to conversational silences. Silence is infused with strong social rationales that associate it with the distribution of significance to certain groups or segments above others. In theatre, the speech–silence balance can be nuanced, expressing contingency and bewilderment as underlying aspects of social life alongside the disarray that incapacitates purposive action. ‘Pinteresque’ silences, both acoustic and metaphysical, are dual: one when no word is spoken; the other when a torrent of language is being employed. Finally, ostracism is an inverted mode of silence, not imposing silence on another, but practising silence against another, reducing the target to unhearability.