As I approach the final few months of my time in Berlin, I turn toward the gaps in my research, figuring out how best to fill the remaining time. I comb through interview transcripts and fieldnotes, reflecting on the richness of conversations with interlocutors, on moments where couples led the discussion to places I hadn’t anticipated. Somewhere in between the sprawling topics and the depth of conversation, I am drawn toward the silences that colour my data.
There are the reflective silences of couples thinking before answering an interview question, and the way silence seems to exist within a relationship, as a mode of being, or a tool used to facilitate reconciliation after conflict. There is the silence in fieldnotes, where the sounds of the city bleed into my reflections and fill pauses. As I write this, I am also noting a radio silence between myself and interlocutors, as I dig into data and make less time for in-field interactions.
But what really sticks out to me is the quality of silence in interviews. In transcripts of earlier interviews, I notice a haste in my responses; I remember feeling anxious to respond to interlocutors’ reflections, to not leave their vulnerability in the open too long. As I became accustomed to doing interviews, I began to recognise the potential for silence, to trust that interlocutors feel heard, and that often, given a moment to pause, they have more to share. Indeed, some of the most unexpected and interesting reflections have emerged from these stretches of silence, as interlocutors feel around their memories for resonant moments to bring up. Conversations on what everyday life together looks like move between present and past as interlocutors are reminded what has brought them to the current configuration of time shared with their partner. Playful disagreements between couples about what she was wearing when they first met, or who first suggested that trip to France, expand into pauses, offering an insight into how they navigate, reconcile, or maintain differences in the shared story of their relationship. In these moments, I have learnt to remain silent as the couple comes to an understanding (or not!), rather than jump in with more questions.
As silence has emerged as an unexpected facet of fieldwork, I have tried to sensitise myself to which silences feel generative. At the same time, there have been moments with interlocutors where I am too reliant on silence. In one interview, I remember stretching a pause for too long after he had responded to a question, waiting for and expecting a reflective follow-up to his response. In just a few seconds, the silence became uncomfortable and awkward, only resolved when he pointed it out, and we laughed about how awkward silence can be. In clumsier interactions like this, and in more generative pauses, I am reminded how the quality of connection is so foundational to ethnography, and how silence, as a feature of interviews I hadn’t anticipated, can foster trust, understanding, and care, qualities not dissimilar to those of the loving relationships at the centre of my research.
Turning towards the remaining time in Berlin, I feel a renewed capacity to be open to the richness of interactions in the field. With plans in the coming months to focus on follow-up interviews and engagement with existing interlocutors, I had placed less emphasis on the day-to-day interactions within the field than I had at the start, but reflecting on silence has sparked a curiosity about other unforeseen qualities of fieldwork. Remembering an art class where I was encouraged to look at the negative space around a model instead of the figure itself, I wonder what else might emerge if I pay close attention to the presumed empty spaces in my research?
