« Listening to Quaker Silence »
On the basis of Quaker meetings observed in a Derbyshire town between 2000 and 2006, the author shows a religious activity being carried out every Sunday by local Friends, in stillness and silence, without any liturgy or priesthood. The author focuses on silence as an anthropological object and using the tools of sensorial approach, also taking into account spatial and temporal organisation, objects and participants’ bodies. Quaker silence comes out as part of a spiritual quest as well as of a ritual, despite explicit Friends’ determination to do away with symbols. It supports the view that the senses are part and parcel of social life and hence of fieldwork. At the same time, silent meetings take on their full meaning in the light of the Friends’ moral and political involvement in society at large.