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Monasteries are typically characterized by physical and symbolic limitations on access as they are usually known through written texts and accounts by nuns who live in that world but do not allow others to have access. This has often resulted in research based on indirect sources. This volume is the result of observant participation in which the ethnographer is a protagonist social actor in two French monasteries of Discalced Carmelite nuns. The author experiences and narrates details of their everyday life that usually remain unseen but contribute to shaping community-building processes and, at the same time, construe the religious woman.
“Francesca Sbardella enters the monasteries on tiptoe, and leads us into the refectory and the bare cells to report the conversations that the nuns weave during their few minutes of recreation. Attentive to the gestures, the rites and the glances that weigh as much or perhaps more than words.” • Libero, Lucia Esposito
Francesca Sbardella is an anthropologist and historian of religion and a professor at the University of Bologna. Interested in the contemporary European religious fi eld, she deals with total institutions, magical-religious materiality and musealisation processes. She is the co-director of the Research Center Eidola, Materiality, Cognition and History of Religions.
Foreword
Simon Ditchfield
Notes on Text
Prologue
Chapter 1. Relationality of Silence
Chapter 2. The Silence of Their God
Chapter 3. Alone among the Others
Chapter 4. Negated Bodies
Chapter 5. Subjects’ Objectification
Afterword
Fabio Dei
References
Appendix: Photographs in Silence, Photographs of Silence by Franco Zecchin