Making silence together : collaboration in the silent gatherings of Quakers
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- The central phenomenon of interest in this text is silence, specifically group silence in social interaction. I offer insights gained from a mixed-method, multi-year ethnographic investigation among the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as Quakers. For more than three and a half centuries, Quakers have practiced group silence. It forms the very core of their collective approach to religious life and a mystical experience they call 'unity.' Part of what makes Quakers' long, deliberate silences compelling and worthy of study is how strikingly they contrast to situations of silence outside the Quaker Meetinghouse. In Anglo-American culture, group silence is often experienced as uncomfortable, sometimes painfully so: the 'awkward silence, ' scrupulously avoided in conversation among people who have just met, or that hangs in the classroom air after a teacher's question, or that falls inexplicably and contagiously over a room full (now suddenly empty) of conversation. Silence has developed a reputation for being an uncomfortable void, empty of words and thus empty of sense. Compounding this reputation, scholars have been relatively quiet on the subject of silence compared to the attention given linguistic phenomena. The Quaker community I describe, Pacific Friends Meeting (PFM), is a contemporary instance of a centuries-old religious movement, organized around weekly leaderless gatherings as occasions for shared spiritual experience. The gathering is called 'Meeting for Worship.' The most distinctive aspect of a Quaker worship gathering is that it is conducted almost entirely in silence, punctuated by brief, occasional speech acts by participants moved to share an insight that has just occurred to them during worship. Contemporary Quakers are not well-represented in the social science literature. This dissertation contributes one of the few ethnographic studies of contemporary Quaker worship practice, conducted over four years, and is the first to introduce video recordings of Quaker worship into the scholarly record. I developed custom software to analyze these videos and my analysis shows that Quakers demonstrate synchrony in their embodied practice of silence: the tiny body movements and sounds that Quakers make (coughs, fidgets, sniffles, scratches) become coordinated in the silence into waves of synchronous activity. The empirical evidence suggests that Quakers tune into one other's bodily presence in the silence. The experiential evidence, drawn from Quakers' own accounts, confirms this and indicates that the co-presence of others provides social support to participants in their religious practice. My mixed-method approach lends support for the dissertation's central thesis that Quaker group silence is: embodied (multi-sensory), collaborative (multi-body), a means for mystical experience.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic; electronic resource; remote |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Publication date | 2012 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Associated with | Steinbock, Daniel Joshua |
|---|---|
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Education. |
| Primary advisor | Pea, Roy D |
| Thesis advisor | Pea, Roy D |
| Thesis advisor | Barron, Brigid |
| Thesis advisor | McDermott, Ray (Raymond Patrick), 1946- |
| Advisor | Barron, Brigid |
| Advisor | McDermott, Ray (Raymond Patrick), 1946- |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Daniel Steinbock. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the School of Education. |
| Thesis | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2012. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2012 by Daniel Joshua Steinbock
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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