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On Presence
“Drunken Lake.” On the journey from Ossora to Tymlat, or on the
way back—Drunken Lake is where people usually stop to drink. The
reindeer herder went off. The veterinarian and I sat on the sled, star-
ing into the starry night, waiting for our guide to return. In those
hours, we did not say much, but there was no uncomfortable silence.
The night was cold but beautiful, and there was simply not much to
say. The silence was full and perfect; words would have marked it as
empty and unfulfilling.
In the tundras of northern Kamchatka and Chukotka, I encoun-
tered this sort of silence frequently. It did not matter if I found my-
self drinking tea for hours with Koriak friends in silence, whether in
the village or the tundra. If broken at all, the silence was interrupted
only by the word eshche, whose intonation in those situations simply
meant “more tea?” Or sometimes I found myself in the camp, watch-
ing reindeer with others for hours on end. And sometimes we just sat
outside in front of the tent, tanning. At other times, we stood for a
long time, observing the direction of the wind, trying to tell if tomor-
row the snow would be heavy enough to let us embark on sustained
travel. There were many moments like this, all of them marked by si-
lence. As for me, I frequently experienced these moments as peace-
ful and whole, because nothing mattered then except the company of
people, motions of the body and hands, tea, or the feel of the weather
and the wind.
How does one begin to think about silence? And, even more dif-
ficult, how does one speak about it, about that which, almost by its
very nature, is unspeakable. Silence is hardly the sort of thing, if thing
it be, that makes for good ethnography. Not much, except perhaps
for the boredom that Michael Taussig ( 2004 , 59 ) mentions—could
be less the stuff of exciting ethnographies or more resistant to rep-
resentation. Ethnographies rest on the written word, and everybody
wants to know what people said. But why do people remain silent?
Especially when there is nothing in particular to hide? I do not think
that the reason is the lethargy to which, at least in northern Kam-
chatka and Chukotka, some fairly high-ranking administrators, in-
digenous and otherwise, sometimes refer. As if silence, like the leth-
argy (so they say), were innate. Perhaps it is just the sense of the land,
