Informed by the author’s personal experiences and over forty years of fieldwork in China and Taiwan, this book explores how people can live with loss and memory as they echo across space and time.

From the ghost of the author’s sister to the three deaths of a Chinese goddess, Haunting Silence intertwines two broad themes that address how we live with the silences of absence and loss. First, silences pose an extreme case of the difficulties of interpretation. Silences resist interpretation, yet push us to try. That is why they so often haunt. The second theme is that silences are inherent to rhythm, and therefore social life. Haunting Silence consolidates these two points. Rhythms socialize silence but cannot avoid the insurmountable problems of interpretation that it brings. If we see the beats as those moments when things take form and become meaningful, the silences that we know will follow open the possibility that those meanings will again dissolve.

The resulting tension between the need to interpret and the dissolution of meaning runs through the book, raising issues of haunting, memory, and the difficulties of writing about them. It also pushes us to see how change and time are built directly into the nature of the social. The evidence for this argument rests on a combination of over forty years of fieldwork in China and Taiwan, paired with family experiences, where the research experiences and the personal ones inform each other. Ethnographic at heart, it also pushes at the edges of what counts as ethnography.