""This work is a masterpiece already as it stands now! It presents an unusually rich ethnography of a part of a community in Europe's farthest Arctic Northeast, with a focus on an extremely difficult topic to do fieldwork on: the conversion of a so-far hardly known group of reindeer nomads to radical evangelical Baptism / Pentecostalism." - Florian Stammler, author of Reindeer Nomads Meet the Market: Culture, Property and Globalisation at the "End of the Land" "Although not working from within the subdiscipline of linguistic anthropology, Vallikivi foregrounds speaking and communication in his analysis of the transformation from "pagan" to Christian. He finds a complex interweaving of speaking and refraining from speaking is key to Nenets personhood, and demonstrates how we have to understand cultural ways of speaking in order to understand Nenets Baptists and Pentecostals. [...] I have been reviewing book manuscripts for two decades for over a dozen presses, and this is by far the most polished and impressive manuscript I have read." - Alexander D. King, author of Living with Koryak Traditions: Playing with Culture in Siberia Words and Silences tells the story of an extraordinary group of independent Nenets reindeer herders in the northwest Russian Arctic. Under socialism these nomads managed to avoid the Soviet state and its institutions of collectivization but soon after the atheist regime collapsed, while some staunchly resisted, many of them became fervent fundamentalist Christians. By exploring differing concepts of how traditional and convert Nenets use and define words, and of the meanings they ascribe to the withholding of speech, Vallikivi shows how a local form of global Christianity has emerged through intricate negotiations of self, sociality, and cosmology. Moving beyond studies of modernization and globalization that have all-too-predictable outcomes for indigenous peoples, Words and Silences invites us to view not only religious devotees, but words themselves, as agents of a complex and ongoing transformation"--

In struggles over access to land, Aboriginal women's concerns have often remained unacknowledged. Their words - and silences - have been frequently misheard, misunderstood, misrepresented, misused. The controversy about 'secret women's business' in the Hindmarsh Island Bridge conflict has brought this issue to the attention of the general public. How can Aboriginal women assert their claims while protecting, by remaining silent, their culturally sensitive knowledge? How can they prevent their words and silences being misrepresented? Words and Silences explores the barriers confronting Aboriginal women trying to defend their land rights. The contributors to this volume provide insights into the intricacies of Aboriginal social and cultural knowledge, and introduce the reader to different understandings of how the gendered nature of Aboriginal land ownership adds complexity to the cross-cultural encounter. In lively and engaging prose they document the ongoing struggles of Aboriginal women across Australia, who are fighting to ensure they receive due recognition of their rights in land.

Your Silence Will Not Protect You collects the essential essays and poems of Audre Lorde for the first time, including the classic 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House'. A trailblazer in intersectional feminism, Lorde's luminous writings have inspired a new generation of thinkers and writers charged by the Black Lives Matter movement. Her lyrical and incisive prose takes on sexism, racism, homophobia, and class; reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope that remain ever-more trenchant today. Also a celebrated poet, Lorde was New York State Poet Laureate until her death; her poetry and prose together produced an aphoristic and incomparably quotable style, as evidenced by her constant presence on many Women's Marches against Trump across the world. This beautiful edition honours the ways in which Lorde's work resonates more than ever thirty years after they were first published.

The result of a dialogue between poets and scholars on the meaning and making of the sacred, this book endeavours to determine how the sacred emerges in sacred script as well as in poetic discourse. It ranges through scholarship in areas as apparently disparate as postmodernism and Buddhism. The perspectives developed are various and without closure, locating the sacred in modes as diverse as patristic traditions, feminist retranslations of biblical texts, and oral and written versions of documents from the world’s religions. The essays cohere in their preoccupation with the crucial role language plays in the creation of the sacred, particularly in the relation that language bears to silence. In their interplay, language does not silence silence by, rather, calls the other as sacred into articulate existence.

A meditation on the infinite search for meanings in silence, from Wallis Wilde-Menozzi, the author of The Other Side of the Tiber and Mother Tongue. We need quiet to feel nothing, to hear silence that brings back proportion and the beauty of not knowing except for the outlines of what we live every day. Something inner settles. The right to silence unmediated by social judgment. Sitting at a table in an empty kitchen, peeling an apple, I wait for its next transformation. For a few seconds, the red, mottled, dangling skin unwinds what happened to it on earth. Wallis Wilde-Menozzi set out to touch silence for brief experiences of what is real. In images, dreams, and actions, the challenge leads to her heart as a writer. The pages of Silence and Silences form a vast tapestry of meanings shaped by many forces outside personal circumstance. Moving closer, the reader notices intricacies that shift when touched. As the writer steps aside, there is cosmic joy, biological truth, historical injustice. The reader finds women’s voices and women’s silences, sees Agnes Martin’s thin, fine lines and D. H. Lawrence’s artful letters, and becomes a part of Wilde-Menozzi’s examination of the ever-changing self. COVID-19 thrusts itself into the unbounded narrative, and isolation brings with it a new kind of stillness. As Wilde-Menozzi writes, “Reading a book is a way of withdrawing into silence. It is a way of seeing and listening, of pulling back from what is happening at that very moment.” The author has created a record of how we tell ourselves stories, how we think and how we know. Above all, she has made silence a presence as rich as time on the page and given readers space to discover what that means to a life.

The first treaty that was made was between the earth and the sky. It was an agreement to work together. We build all of our treaties on that original treaty. On the banks of the river that have been Mishomis’s home his whole life, he teaches his granddaughter to listen—to hear both the sounds and the silences, and so to learn her place in Creation. Most importantly, he teaches her about treaties—the bonds of reciprocity and renewal that endure for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows, and the rivers flow. Accompanied by beautiful illustrations by Luke Swinson and an author’s note at the end, Aimée Craft affirms the importance of understanding an Indigenous perspective on treaties in this evocative book that is essential for readers of all ages.

This book promotes a Lacanian approach to silence, arguing that Lacanian psychoanalysis is distinctive for putting a high value on both silence and language. Unlike other disciplines and discourses the authors do not treat silence as a mystical-impossible beyond, at the cost of demoting the value of language and thought. Rather than treating silence with awe and wonder, this book puts silence to work, and it does so in order to deal with the inevitable alienation that comes with becoming speaking-beings. This illuminating book will be of great interest to scholars of Lacan and the psychosocial, as well as more broadly to philosophers and linguists alike.