Keep It in the Family: Writing With Silence
Suvi Rautio (Univiversity of Helsinki) will discuss her ethnographic exploration of the gulf between silence and story in her Chinese-Finnish family's past under Mao Zedong's rule.
The Anthropology Department welcomes Suvi Rautio, to deliver her lecture “Keep It in the Family: Writing With Silence.”
When anthropologists work on life projects that are part microhistory and part memoir, learning how to protect—or when necessary, break—research participants’ unspoken secrets becomes fundamental. Through an ethnographic account that begins with my family history, this lecture explores the challenges that are explicitly marked by knowing when to probe into secrets and knowing when to refrain from doing so.
Building on anthropological literature on silence and secrets, I write about the relationship between myself, an anthropologist, and my father, my research participant, as I piece together the lived experiences of my wider kin as a Chinese-Finnish mixed-race family living in Beijing under Mao Zedong’s rule.
At a time when careful monitoring and mutual surveillance geared people’s everyday affairs, I describe how secrets, self-enforced social forgetting, repression and disremembering explicitly shapes the biographical narratives of many that grew up in this insulated environment. Collaboration and co-production remain fundamental tools that allow me to probe into the gulf between silence and the stories that my interlocutors tell of themselves to protect silence.
Suvi Rautio is a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at the University of Helsinki, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow based at CUNY.