Abstract

This introduction aims at showing how recent anthropology has read gossip and rumors as spaces through which discourses and imaginaries relating to the occult are given. At the same time, it focuses on the practices of secrecy that unravel the tension between saying and keeping silent, revealing, and hiding, that are at work in the often-conflicting processes of construction, transmission and management of memory, historical knowledge, or heritage. Finally, it poses some epistemological and methodological questions about fieldworking in areas in which sayable and unspeakable, visible, and invisible are extremely intertwined