quiet theater: The Radical Politics of Silence

Abstract

This article examines the potential of a transdisciplinary ethnographic approach that bridges ethnography, performance, storytelling, and imagination to contribute to an activist research practice within anthropology and other disciplines. It focuses on my current research project that studies, by means of dramatic storytelling, the impact of migration on Polish Romani women’s experiences of aging. In the dramatic storytelling sessions, the ethnographer and the interlocutor stepped into character and co-performed fictional stories loosely based on their own lives. Situating the project within the context of an “imaginative ethnography” that is concerned with people’s imaginative lifeworlds, and methodological experimentations at the ground level of fieldwork, this article discusses the ways the project challenged traditional conceptions of engagement and advocacy. It considers the silence—“quiet theatre”—that engulfed the interlocutor–ethnographer interactions in the storytelling sessions as a form of radical empathic politics that works through affect, projective approximation, and empathy. In doing so, the article proposes a conceptualization of interventionist research practice as a contextually specific particularity that takes to task the meanings of politics in academic activism.