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Recursive Epistemologies and an Ethics of Attention
is. The experiential difference is this: in one place, I could hear; and
in the other, I could not.
Along the Victoria River, on that day, I could hear something I had
experienced often with Jessie but hadn’t quite realized and hadn’t
quite thought to try to articulate. I could hear a listening presence.
The world at that time was not just a place, it was a presence. I could
hear awareness, and so I could call out.
The temptation, when using the written word in academic contexts,
is to find reasons and explanations that fit the existing discourse. And
yet, what happened was embodied responsiveness. It did not matter
exactly what I knew or thought I knew. It mattered that here I heard
something around me and here I had a voice. Here it seemed that that
which was beyond me called forth my voice. All I had to do was let
it move. The call seemed to be invited from beyond me, but, as Gou-
let ( 2004 , personal communication) points out, consent came from
within. Entanglements brought my voice into Jessie’s world.
I am not saying that these two places are qualitatively different; I am
saying only that my experience of them was qualitatively different. For
me, the difference is that my ability to hear gave me a voice. In con-
trast, at Makanba, where I had every good reason to call out, having
been specifically instructed to do so, I was able to voice nothing.
This experience seems to lie outside the general domain of what is
sayable in normative anthropology. Povinelli ( 1995 ), for example,
contends that such matters fall well outside the normative modernity
in which anthropology and other social sciences ground their legiti-
macy. So the experience of finding my voice had a paradoxical effect:
when I returned to the academy, I started to feel voiceless. The find-
ing of a voice in one context rendered me nearly voiceless in another.
My silence in the academy is built up from my knowledge and expe-
rience of boundaries and censure, but perhaps it is also influenced by
the silences that pervade the place. These boundaries, these limits to
what is sayable, are made evident primarily by being breached, and
that rarely happens, so usually it may not be apparent that in an ac-
ademic context that is founded in seminars, lectures, letters, articles,
books, and coffee breaks, there are actually some terrible silences.
They are overcome from time to time by works of passion and dar-
ing that leave one longing for more such riches.
