Real listening means giving up the question
What the best diplomats and anthropologists, know
An elderly woman who had survived the Battle of Okinawa — alone at twenty, everyone in her family dead — looked at a group of leaders from countries that had once been on opposite sides of that war and said: “If there is war, there is no possibility of having a life.” Such simple, straightforward words. But something shifted for each of those leaders in the hearing.
In 2016, I brought these leaders from the United States, Japan, China, Korea, and Taiwan to Okinawa — an island fought over by great powers for centuries, where the 1945 battle killed an estimated 200,000 people, more than 100,000 of them civilians. War memory in this region is fiercely contested. In politics, the usual move is to debate history. In polite international company, the usual move is to sidestep it.
I wanted a different conversation. So I sent participants out in small mixed-nationality teams — Chinese, Korean, American, Japanese, Taiwanese — not to argue with one another, not even to gather data, but simply to have conversations with whoever they met: at a fish market, at a war memorial, near a US military base. Nobody knew quite how. That was the point.
What happened surprised everyone.
People talked. An elderly survivor described living alone from age 20 after everyone around her was killed. A right-wing activist made an impassioned speech about immigration. Base residents talked about anger and memory. The leaders came back subdued. The chatter on the bus ride out was gone on the way back.
One participant, Professor Sung-In Jun of Korea, wrote afterward: “we were so busy saying our own words and that jeopardized the listening part... sometimes you have to let go of your agendas and immediate problems.”
What made the exercise work was an anthropologist’s move I have seen the best diplomats use again and again. You relinquish control of the question. You don’t go in trying to understand what you’ve already decided needs understanding. You go in ready to discover a more interesting question to explore.
This month's Field Guide tells the story of the Okinawa peace-building exercise— the encounters, and the change they created. I teach you four research-backed moves of ethnographic listening, and give you exercises for practicing this in your own peace-making work. Stay tuned for more on listening in next week’s podcast too
