Self-Silencing Strategies in Casual Conversations about Politics in Rural Poland

Self-silencing can be a discursive strategy for presenting personal opinions in casual conversations about politics, especially when these take place in an unpredictable or hostile socio-political environment. In such situations, political identities may be performed through the use of inferred forms, such as allusion, irony, or implicit suggestion. In this article, forms of muting one’s voice by using indirect speech are tracked in interviews conducted among villagers in the mountainous Nowy Targ county in southern Poland at the beginning of the 21 st century. The aim of presenting these examples is to show that sometimes self- silencing can serve to make an adversary’s voice more audible, to help avoid definitive judgment, and to create space for an exchange of opinions.