For a political anthropology of revelations

Silence permeates and encompasses ethnography-based knowledge, as it crosses interactions in the field and their written account. Exploring the different ways anthropological studies understood silence as the absence of speech, as a feature of womanhood and as a "culture" of the oppressed or subaltern groups, this article delves deeper into the politics of silence. Through an analysis of the heuristic potentiality of the concept of "public secrecy", the article proposes to consider silence as a practice that intertwines knowledge and power, and thus, truth. In particular, the investigation scrutinizes two interlocked effects which are implied by the act of silencing: normalization and subjectivation, which are here thought through an ethnography-based perspective. The article takes silence into account through a threefold analysis that, while acknowledging its pervasiveness, obviousness, and inaudibility, questions its characterizations, its functions, and the modes and effects of its disclosure in social life. Anthropology is ethically and epistemologically compelled to self-reflect upon the ways it participates in such processes of silencing and revelation. Hence, discussing the powers of silence in the ethnographic work, and the ways the recently developed hegemony of transparency and its prescriptive regulations are affecting our discipline, the article outlines the idea of an anthropology engaged in the critical understanding of the "revelations of truth".