threads of silence: reflections on long-term fieldwork in galicia

Threads of Silence: Reflections on Long-TermFieldwork in Galiciaanhu_1081 78..88

HEIDI KELLEY

Department of Sociology and AnthropologyUniversity of North Carolina, AshevilleAsheville, NC 28804

SUMMARY This short article is about the realization that the most importantlessons of the author’s long-term fieldwork in Galicia (Spain) since 1985 are renderedin silence. The disruption engendered by the author’s stroke in 1998 and the aphasia,the speechlessness, it created were helpful in her learning process. In this article, theauthor chronicles how she learned to see her physically induced silence as a source ofinsight into the disruptions experienced by her participants, including the communaldisruption endured by the Galician people after the Prestige oil spill disaster. [long-term fieldwork, silence, aphasia, disruption, narrative]

In brief, we should consider speech before it has been pronounced, against theground of silence which precedes it, which never ceases to accompany it, and withoutwhich it would say nothing . . . [W]e should be sensitive to the thread of silence fromwhich the tissue of speech is woven.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, 1973:45–46

The Silences

As a novice anthropologist initiating her fieldwork (see Figure 1) in 1985 inGalicia (the northwestern-most region of Spain)1 words were important tome—from the words in castellano and galego (the language of Galicia) that I usedto communicate with my participants to the analytic constructs that I used in myacademic work. I thought that doing fieldwork was all about words: strugglingto voice my thoughts in another language, coining and asking the decisivequestion, and translating the response to make the insider’s view clear to thereading public. But I had lost my ability to speak—and write—castellano,galego and, for that matter English when I was rendered aphasic by my massivestroke in 1998.2 I thought that fieldwork was impossible with my aphasic andhemiplegic body. I believed that to do fieldwork anthropologists needed to bestrong: fluent in speech and agile in body. I perceived my poststroke body to beweak and I put off thoughts of returning to Galicia.

Then came the oil spill. In 2002, the tanker Prestige split open in the turbulentNovember waters just off Galicia—and just off the coastline of Ezaro, the villagein which I spent most of my fieldwork. I came to see that the Galician regionwas undergoing a collective disruption, just like my personal one. I put awaymy hesitations and booked a trip back to Galicia over the winter break of2002–03.

Anthropology and Humanism, Vol. 36, Issue 1, pp 78–88, ISSN 1559-9167, online ISSN 1548-1409.© 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1409.2011.01081.x.

Enlacing Silences

My original purpose in doing fieldwork in Galicia was to investigate femaleself-image. Galicia is reputed to have a culture that is strongly woman centered:even, in Spanish popular imagery, matriarchal. I quickly learned that genderrelations in my focus village of Ezaro—midway along the undulating Galiciancoastline—are more nuanced than any easy generalizations would have it. Igrounded my initial research question in what is more important in shaping thecontours of women’s experience: prestige (see Ortner and Whitehead 1981), oreveryday understandings of power (see Rogers 1975). Since 1985, my under-standings of what constitutes “prestige,” “power,” and even “culture” havebeen rendered even more fluid, more subject to negotiation, even more slipperyto grasp than before. As Abu-Lughod argues “the culture concept retains thetendency to make difference seem self-evident and people seem ‘other’ ” (Abu-Lughod 1993:10). Over the years of doing research in Galicia, I focused more onthe narratives of individual women—and men—and what they revealed aboutprestige and power in the gender system of Ezaro.

I have used the metaphor of enlacing to make sense of the contradictions inthe narratives of the women of Ezaro (Kelley 1999a). I drew this metaphor fromthe lace-making class I took when I first arrived in Ezaro in January 1986.3

Typical of Galician Januarys, it was rainy—most days sputtering but occasion-ally working up to a full-fledged winter storm—and I was despairing aboutmeeting villagers who seemed to be snugly ensconced in their houses. Despitemy lack of skill with the needle, I took comfort in the lace making, and I relaxedinto the rhythms of rural Galician winter life. Later, I came to see enlacing as arich metaphor for the process of composing womanhood in Ezaro. I sawwomen’s narratives, composed of individual words, as the key element of thatcomposition.

But I found much disruption (Becker 1997)4 in that process of enlacing5:whether the disruptions were geographical dislocations like migration;6

social disturbances, like inheritance disputes (Kelley 1999b);7 or confusionsbetween competing worldviews, like the tensions between discourses linked to

Figure 1.Doing Fieldwork. Photo: Ken Betsalel.

Kelley Threads of Silence 79

subsistence and consumption economies (Kelley 1999a) and social hierarchyand egalitarianism (Roseman 1999b); or the tension between the intimacy of thecasa (the home), and the indifference of public spaces. Parin Dossa, who haswritten about the uses of silence in female Bahia Iranian immigrants’ stories,argues that women “use silence as the language of communication, and thatvalidating this mode of expression is a first step toward taking the leap frombeing a detached to a vulnerable and witnessing observer” (Dossa 2003:52).Fiona Ross remarks too about South Africa that “Silence marks particular waysof knowing, and that silence is gendered” (2001:272). My poststroke insight intothe way Ezaro women enlaced their narratives is that the space betweenwords—the silences—is equally if not more essential to that process of enlacingthan the things expressed in speech.

Linking the argument about the use of silence in women’s speech to mutedregional languages, Roseman has argued, in writing in the galego literaryjournal Festa da Palabra Silenciada about Galician feminists’ struggle to take backthe silenced words, that their struggle “has at least three levels of meaning: thesilencing of women’s lives and voice . . . the silencing of the Galician languageand identity; and the muting, censoring, and confiscating of leftist and non-Castilian nationalist ideological production under Francoism” (Roseman1997:63). Now I see the silence and the discourses muted by more dominantnarratives (Roseman 1997:45) as one of the essential threads for enlacing wom-anhood in Ezaro. The key ingredient enabling that realization was my inarticu-lateness, provoked by my aphasia. My stroke, in giving me an experience ofbodily displacement, was a good teacher in furthering my understanding of myGalician participants’ dislocations, voiced silently but not inarticulately. Nowfaced with a new understanding of my body, I began to realize that I could usethe perceived weaknesses as a source of strength, a spring of insight into myexperience as a fieldworker in Galicia. Gradually I began to see the spacesbetween words as a liminal space where significant points are voiced withoutspeech.8

In this article, I use my understandings from my stroked body to make thepoint that silence is crucial to social healing, whether a Galician woman’s caringfor her dying relatives, an emigrant woman’s gradual readjustment to thephysical and metaphoric rhythms in village life, relatives mending the emo-tional wounds of non falar (not speaking), or the will of the Galician peoplebeing restored after the oil spill. However, I discovered finding one’s voice—again—is essential: pronouncing the caregiver’s power; discovering the agencyof embodying the tensions between two ways of life; finding the words toconverse again after years of not speaking; and speaking back to power in theNunca Máis movement.9

Silence of Caring

I met Catalina soon after I arrived in Santiago de Compostela (the Galiciancapital city) in summer of 1985.10 I was living in her mother María’s pension,and so was she until her marriage in fall of 1985. I was in Santiago to brush upon my castellano, learn galego, and identify a coastal village that met myrequirements of out-migration by men and significant roles for women in the

80 Anthropology and Humanism Volume 36, Number 1

agricultural sphere for my dissertation research. Although I was taking moreformal steps to meet my former goals, I gained most of my fluency in bothlanguages through conversations with Catalina, as she talked while ironing orscrubbing the kitchen after the 10 PM evening meal.

Despite my misguided feeling then that I was in Santiago in “preparation”for my “real” research in a village setting,11 my living situation in María’s casa(household) was ideal for insights into my initial research questions: María’sfather had migrated to Argentina and had invested some of his remittances inthe purchase of the pension. María, in caring for the pension, was doing worksimilar to that of my rural informants in tending the fields of their respectivecasas. María’s husband, who married into María’s household (I was interestedin the matrilocal tendency in household formation as well), commuted every-day to María’s natal aldea (village) where he farmed for María’s natal casa.Catalina, as a member of this household, was committed to its success. Hence,I saw the devotion with which Catalina approached caring for the pension andher mother, María, who had diabetes, manifested in 1985 in María’s frequentheadaches.

But I did not really see Catalina’s role in providing care to other people untilthe winter of 2002 when I returned to Galicia as a stroke survivor. Catalina wascommuting back and forth from her married home in A Coruña (a two-hourdrive away) to María’s home in the aldea and from there,12 commuting toMaría’s bedside in the Santiago hospital. Back in the aldea, Catalina was caringfor her grandmother who now was bedridden. Catalina approached her care forboth her mother and her grandmother with loving practicality.

I had been so focused on establishing my agency as a stroke survivor thatuntil I returned to Galicia, I missed the quiet agency of caregivers. My experi-ence as a stroke survivor has caused me to see the profound power inequalitybetween the “carer” and the “caree” (see Garland-Thomson 2002:16–17).13 Ihave been torn between my experience as a person with disabilities, rejectingthe paternalistic expectations of care givers,14 and my status as a feminist deplor-ing the invisibility of much care provided in the home and the low pay andprestige of care provided in institutions. In Galicia, I witnessed the physical andemotional strain on caregivers and heard their menfolk (and other familymembers) grumbling about the things the caregivers had left undone for them-selves, their menfolk. But I really failed to see, despite my emphasis on women’swork (see Kelley 1999a), the vital role of caretaking and the sometimes difficultchoices women faced as they decided which of their normal work (from culti-vating their fields to nurturing children and husband) to drop to care for sickand dying relatives. In that choice, they evoked—often silently—agency.

The Silences of the Dead

Ana’s house is at the edge of Ezaro, the last house on the ocean side of themain highway before the two cemeteries (Figure 2). It is a “new” house,15 builtduring the early 1980s with money Ana and her husband, Carlos, earned intheir 20-year emigration to London. When I first met Ana in 1985 to inquireabout an apartment in her house, one that I eventually rented, Carlos and theirolder son were back in London, Carlos not caring for the limited opportunities


of his natal village of Ezaro. Ana was content to stay in Ezaro; she confessed aloathing for both the urban and English way of life. But she disdained thetypical agricultural role of other women in Ezaro. Instead, she chose to focus onkeeping house and preparing meals for her younger son. Ana confessed con-tradictory feelings for her village: on the one hand, enjoying the intimacy ofshared knowledge but, on the other hand, disliking the way everybody in Ezaroknows one’s business. She was (and still is) embodying the tension between twoways of life. Ana was on the edge (just like her house on the edge of Ezaro) ofwhat I needed to understand: an edge marked by her eagerness to emigrate inthe early 1960s and her curiosity about the people she met in London but yetdistinguished by her strong yearnings to be back in Ezaro and her familiar terraof Galicia.

Although Ana preferred a well-dusted house to a well-tilled field, contrary tomost of her generation, she too joined the cleaning of the cemeteries before AllSaints and All Souls Days (November 1 and 2) in 1986. It was a busy time inEzaro. The village women went into a cleaning frenzy, tidying up the previouslyneglected cemeteries, tearing up weeds, scrubbing the tombstones or theniches, and bringing fresh chrysanthemums and new candles to the graves oftheir family members. It was a time for social remembrance too, a time forretelling tales of avisos (lit. “information”), received from the other side(Roseman 2003) to warn the living of the imminent death of one of them. It wasan apt time for seeing, or in Ana’s case, hearing avisos too. When in 1986 bothAna and her friend heard a knock from the inside of the niche that they werecleaning,16 they went running out of the cemetery crying. “No era nada agrad-able,” (it wasn’t pleasant),17 Ana explained several times, when she invited mefor coffee the next day. She interpreted it as an aviso immediately. Her father hada mild case of emphysema. Was that the meaning of the aviso? Her sister hadconverted to Jehovah’s Witness. Was the knock intended to warn her of theerrors of her ways?

Figure 2.Ezaro Cemetery. Photo: Ken Betsalel.


My own mother died two weeks from Ana’s aviso.18 It was not until my firstvisit back in 1988 that Ana told me she figured it out that the warning was meantfor me. Ana had told Carlos first, to test her theory out, that the aviso was meantfor me, but he urged her not to tell me. Carlos viewed himself a more sophis-ticated man than Ana, who, in his perspective, was still mired in the hopelessvillage custom. He assumed that I, as a modern American woman, would nottake Ana’s version seriously. I could imagine their communication (I witnessedmany similar interactions): he, questioning the veracity of her senses, pooh-poohing the whole premonition idea as foolish superstition, she sticking to herstory stubbornly.

In accepting Ana’s interpretation of the events that November day in 1986, Iwas, with Ana’s aid, “making personal memories ‘social’ ” (Roseman 2003:440).This was helping me and Ana, who, in telling me about my mother’s aviso, wasmaking sense of the disruptions of her life. She was moving “from the loneli-ness of despair to the comforting arena of sociality” (Roseman 2003:440). Intelling her interpretation of the aviso, Ana was enlacing me—the anthropologist,the ambiguous figure par excellence—and the silent language of the dead, intoher life narrative. In telling and retelling me the story of the aviso, Ana wasnarrating her reintegration into the life of Ezaro. Her natal village is a placewhere she could communicate with the dead. But not everyone in Ezaro—forexample, Carlos—embraced that communication equally. It was not until Isurvived a massive insult to my bodily integrity that I more fully appreciatedthe disruption that Ana experienced at her emigration, at her return to Ezaro,and in her tumultuous relation with Carlos. She was wedged in between themodern way of life, with its coldly impersonal but still enticing efficiency, andthe way of life that most women in her village were, and that Ana was, stillsilently embracing.

Silence of Non Falar

Ana was not on speaking terms with another of my key participants, Mari-Carmen, in the mid-1980s. Ana and Mari-Carmen are first cousins, embodyingin their practice of silence an inheritance dispute from their mothers’ genera-tion. Their mothers are sisters. Carmen (Mari-Carmen’s mother) inherited thehouse from her mother. Carmen’s sister (Ana’s mother, Manola), and her othersiblings, thought the inheritance was not fairly divided. Carmen, who hademigrated to Argentina and then after her marriage there (to a man from Ezaro)to Uruguay, suggested to me that the only reason her mother begged her tocome back to be the millorada (principal heir) and take care of her (and herfather) was that her mother was greedy for the cartos (money) from “America.”Manola (Carmen’s sister), and the others siblings inherited their mother’s view,according to Carmen’s account. Her siblings thought that Carmen had a secretshare of money spirited away to finance the renovation of the house (e.g.,putting in indoor plumbing) or fund Mari-Carmen’s university education (still,in the 1980s, a relative luxury for Ezaro).19

Other inheritance disputes among family members were highlights ofmy conversations with my participants in Ezaro and were often “settled” bythe informal custom of not speaking (non falando) to the other party in the


disagreement. The tenets of non falar are rooted in the women’s world of thecasa and subsistence farming—the family, house, and land—and the inheritancedisputes that made Galicia one of the most litigious of the regions of Spain(Lisón Tolosana 1979:17–20). Although some inheritance disputes ended up inthe official public space of the courtroom, women enforced them in the informaltactic of non falar in the more intimate public spaces: the rúas and fincas (thestreets and fields) of Ezaro.

One might see not talking as an effective way of diffusing the tensions in asmall village. But I saw the profound emotional costs of not speaking. Ana andMari-Carmen, in circuitous ways, were always asking me about the other.Granted in part they might have been asking for more information to fuel thefires of their familial discord: for example, Ana asking about Mari-Carmen’snever-begun career as a schoolteacher (Mari-Carmen kept failing the state-runsystem of exams), or Mari-Carmen asking about the plans of Ana’s husbandCarlos to return to Ezaro. But I saw a trace of sadness in their questioning, asthough they deeply cared about one another but could not admit it.

I was deeply troubled by the denial of sociality implied in Ana and Mari-Carmen’s not talking to each other. It was a common custom in Ezaro to “solve”contentions among family members (and others) by non falar. But I so wasfocused on the discord expressed in this custom that I failed to notice the agencyit gave women (and men) still implicated in the subsistence way of life, based onthe inheritance of land. That source of agency was one of the few left associatedwith the subsistence ethos as it was increasingly challenged by a more modern,cash-based economy, with its disregard for land inheritance. That agency, none-theless, came at an emotional cost. After I finished my first stint of fieldwork, Iperceived a thaw in Mari-Carmen and Ana’s relationship, perhaps, in partbecause of asking each other if the other had heard from me. On my first visitback to Ezaro (in 1988), Ana joined Mari-Carmen and me on a hike up to thenew dam.20 Their interactions on that walk were frosty but civil. Over theintervening years, I saw, in letters and visits, their relationship growing morerelaxed, more like cousins. But in our visit during winter of 2002, I was startledto see Ana’s mother Manola, who was Mari-Carmen’s aunt and Carmen’s sister,visiting in her sister Carmen’s house. She arrived after the midday meal andtook coffee with us. The family dispute was obviously healed, a stony silencereplaced with cozy sociality. In the silence imposed by non falar, the family wasable to heal the wounds inflicted by a seemingly unfair distribution of propertyand find the courage and the voice to restart a spoken relationship.21

Silence of Resistance

The region of Galicia has suffered much disruption in Spanish history frominternal colonization, from the imposition of castellano and the decline in localcustoms, to the leadership of strong men (caciques) and the lack of economicdevelopment in the region, even after Franco’s death in 1975 and the establish-ment of autonimía (autonomy) status.22 On November 13, 2002, the tankerPrestige—carrying some 77,000 tons of oil (García Negro and Doldán Garcían.d.)—foundered and on November 19, broke apart in the Atlantic Ocean nearEzaro and dumped,23 in the successive “black tides,” some 20 million tons of oil


onto the Galician, Cantabrian, and French coastlines (Social and EnvironmentalResearch Institute n.d.), marring prime fishing and seafood harvesting grounds.The continuing devastation—to the physical environment and to the fabric ofhuman relationships—was grimly silent.

Because they depended on fishermen to keep their business afloat, Carlosand Ana’s hardware shop was floundering when I visited in December 2002.24

Ana had finally persuaded Carlos to come back to Ezaro and construct a five-story building in a nearby town, containing apartments and their own hardwarestore. This and countless other stories of social and environmental wreckagespurred a resistance. The Nunca Máis movement was founded in the weeksafter the oil spill, giving Galicians a chance to speak back to power and silentlyshow their strength in the display of Nunca Máis banners and finally give voiceto their resistance in rallies and protest marches.

Like my stroke, where the social ramifications were much worse than theinitial physical insult to my body, the oil spill, the environmental trauma—badenough—was made far worse by the reactions of the Spanish national govern-ment and the multinational corporations involved. Just as my learning to speakagain is an act of protest to the doctors who predicted I would never teachagain, the Nunca Máis social movement in response to the Prestige oil spilldisaster is an act of collective resistance to the national and multinational forcesthat played havoc with the region of Galicia. My return visit to Galicia in thewinter of 2002–03, spurred by the oil spill, gave me a chance to socially healfrom my stroke a bit more, getting back my roles as fieldworker and friend tomy Galician companions. I learned too, over the course of doing long-termfieldwork, that attending to the marginal, the disrupted, and the silent is amuscular source for anthropological insights into the human condition of bothmy participants and myself.

Notes

1. I did my original dissertation fieldwork in Galicia from May 1985 to May 1987. Iwas in Santiago de Compostela for six months, and in the coastal village of Ezaro for 18months. I have spent time (from two weeks to six weeks in a time) in Galicia—in mainlySantiago and Ezaro—in the intervening years. My dissertation research was funded bythe Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, a Fulbright-Hays/SpanishGovernment Grant, the National Science Foundation, and the Social Science ResearchCouncil and the American Council Learned Societies. My warmest thanks go to thepeople of Ezaro, Santiago, and other towns in Galicia for graciously inviting me intotheir homes and lives. I thank James Taggart, Ken Betsalel, and Monica Fauble for theirhelpful comments on earlier versions of this article; Ann Moroni and Brenda Pickard forediting help; and Ken Betsalel for his photographs and partnership.

2. Aphasia is defined by the National Aphasia Association (NAA) as “an acquiredcommunication disorder that impairs an individual’s ability to use language. Theprimary symptom is an inability to express oneself when speaking; however, in somecases, reading and writing or understanding of speech can be the more impaired modal-ity” (NAA n.d.:2). I was able to understand and read in all three languages, however, atmy prestroke levels of comprehension.

3. According in my participants in Ezaro, lace making, once important, had fallen offwith the shift to a more cash-based economy. This lace-making class was part of an efforton revive lace making, for sale to tourists who like “authentic” regional crafts, and toboth urban and rural Galicians who have recently been enjoying a renewal of the galegolanguage and with it, a taste for “traditional” Galician crafts.


4. See Roseman 1999a for another application of the concept of “disruption” toethnographic material from Galicia.

5. See Roseman and Kelley 1999:91–92 for a summary of historical factors to whichanthropologists and other scholars have pointed in arguing for the distinctiveness ofGalicia as compared to other regions in Spain.

6. A few women from Ezaro migrated to Latin America (e.g., Argentina, Uruguay) inthe 1950s; beginning in the 1960s, women began to migrate to other parts of Europe (e.g.,England, Switzerland, Germany) and to North America. Since the 1860s many men fromEzaro migrated to Latin America, as did their counterparts from all over Galicia (largelyfrom the coastal region; see Villares Paz 1980). That male emigration caused muchdisruption to the lives of my participants. See Kelley 1988 for more information about thenature and social impact of emigration from Ezaro.

7. See Roseman and Kelley 1999:94 for more information on the Galician stem-household.

8. See Basso (1970) who urges anthropologists to consider silence as well as speech inour analyses of discourse.

9. See White 2007 for more information on the Nunca Máis social movement.10. All names are pseudonyms.11. Over the years of my fieldwork in Galicia, I saw the important role cities played

in the villagers’ identities (and vice-versa) and, starting in the case of María’s casa, I sawhow fully intertwined are cities and villages in an economic and metaphorical sense (seeGulevich 1997, Roseman 2004).

12. The pension was long sold. María had returned to her natal home in the aldea justoutside of Santiago.

13. Rather than refer to my partner, Ken Betsalel, as my caregiver, I (and many otherstroke survivors) find more equality in the term cosurvivor. Thanks to Edna Tipton (acosurvivor herself), founder of the Asheville Aphasia Support Group, for suggesting thatterm (in turn, she heard at from the National Aphasia Association annual meeting).

14. Journalist Joseph P. Shapiro gives a good overview of the disability rights move-ment in his aptly titled book, No Pity (1993).

15. At least by the standards of my 1985–87 fieldwork.16. Ezaro has two cemeteries—the old one where the dead are buried in the ground

and the new one, which contains mausoleums.17. Ana frequently spoke to me in castellano despite knowing English and despite

speaking galego to her family members and other villagers.18. My mother, diagnosed with melanoma one month into my dissertation field-

work, had wanted me to carry on with my fieldwork, but everything during my originalstay in Galicia was etched with that looming knowledge of her death.

19. See Kelley 1999b for a more extended description and analysis of that inheritancedispute.

20. The most noticeable change since my original fieldwork was the dam on the riverXallas that flows out to sea at Ezaro. See Kelley 1988:229–230 for more information aboutthe original dam and Kelley 2003 (“Green Is the Color of Galician Death”) for a poeticinterpretation.

21. The diminishment of the economic and metaphorical value of land surely is afactor in the healing of family disputes over land.

22. When the 1978 Constitution was signed, Galicia became one of the 17 autono-mous regions of the Spanish nation-state, with galego officially recognized as theregional language. For the history of Galicia, see Villares Paz 1980.

23. The Prestige sank 133 kilometers off the coast of Cape Finisterre (García Pérez2003); Cape Finisterre is 6.4 nautical miles from Ezaro (Ezaro, Spain Page n.d.).

24. See García Negro and Doldán García (n.d.) for a brief report on the economiccosts of the oil spill.


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