███ in the Field: Lies, Silences, Half-Truths

In the form of a photo essay, this text grapples with some central questions facing ███ anthropologists doing research in countries where their personal identities are, at best culturally unpalatable, at worst illegal. In this personal account, experiences in two countries (Russia and China) are contrasted. In the latter, elusiveness in responses to personal questions from interlocutors can help carve out spaces of ambiguity. In the former, by contrast, anti-███ legislation (the federal law “for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values”) requires explicit forms of denial and excision of one’s family at home. These different authoritarian contexts and positioning of ███ identities lead to different forms of redaction, as reflected in the blurry vs. blacked out photographs—with the ultimate realization that the practice of redaction in itself indexes silences readily decoded by interlocutors as forms of coming out.