Matei Candea, Taras Fedirko, Paolo Heywood, and Fiona Wright
https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9781487548841
We’re delighted to announce the publication of our new edited volume, Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power, which emerged from a five-year European Research Council project titled ‘Situating Free Speech: European Parrhesia in Comparative Perspective.’
This book arrives at a critical moment in public discourse. In recent years, freedom of speech has become the focus of extensive and embittered debates within the US and Europe. Critics fear the rise of a cancel culture and accuse proponents of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and no-platforming, thus challenging freedom of speech. Those critiqued, in turn, accuse their critics of invoking freedom of speech disingenuously to protect established interests.
Yet while free speech has long attracted extensive theoretical attention in legal studies, philosophy, and political science, our understanding of how people relate to free speech in their everyday lives – in concrete historical and geographic contexts – has remained paradoxically limited. Our project and this resulting volume address this gap by putting these Euro-American debates about freedom of speech into a broader and richer comparative frame.
Our ERC project, based at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, brought together ethnographic studies of how free speech is lived on the ground by activists, teachers, politicians, intellectuals, and artists in times of crisis and political transformation. Four key case studies formed the core of our research, each chosen to highlight intra-European differences between types of actors, political orientations, legal and institutional frameworks, and cultural and historical backgrounds.
In Paris, Matei Candea examined a court specializing in free speech law, where French republican principles are tested and debated daily through concrete cases (Candea 2019, 2021, 2024). In Italy, Paolo Heywood focussed on the small town in the heart of the Italian red belt where Mussolini was born and is buried – a place that remains haunted by the spectre of fascism and recently grappled with the prospect of hosting Italy’s first and only museum of fascism (see 2022; 2023; 2024). In the UK, Fiona Wright studied a pioneering psychotherapeutic practice known as ‘Open Dialogue,’ which brings together a patient’s social network in a single context and values each voice equally, raising questions about how free speech functions not only politically but as a channel for inner states and relationships (Wright 2022; Forthcoming). Finally, in Ukraine, Taras Fedirko investigated how journalists’ debates about freedom of speech played out broader conflicts about liberty of their labour from censorial control by oligarch media owners, and about Ukrainian nation’s political independence from imperialist domination in the context of the war in Donbas (Fedirko 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023; Dzenovska and Fedirko 2021).
This comparative approach informs our edited volume, which expands significantly beyond these initial case studies to examine freedom of speech through an even broader lens. Our contributors reveal the remarkable diversity in how different societies imagine and enact the relationship between speech, freedom, and constraint from Ireland to India, from Palestine to West Papua, and from contemporary Java to early twentieth-century Britain,.
The book challenges the common assumption that an unlimited aspiration to individual freedom of speech is a distinctive feature of modern Western liberalism. For some, this assumption makes freedom of speech an avatar of a cherished way of life perceived as being under threat. For others, it makes appeals to such freedom potentially suspect, insufficiently socially conscious, and culturally parochial. Our volume suggests that both perspectives miss the mark by oversimplifying a complex reality.
The book is organized around four key themes that emerged from our research:
First, we examine various traditions of free speech, exploring both the internal diversity of Western liberal thought and its complex historical interactions with other religious and secular visions. These range from ancient Greek parrhesia to Islamic notions of reasoned criticism, from early twentieth-century Vietnamese rethinking of Confucian language norms to Mormon truth-speaking in the contemporary American right. This section troubles the idea that concerns about free speech across the world are necessarily a derivative discourse of Euro-American political thought.
Second, we investigate how different societies negotiate the relationship between free speech and public life. Our contributors explore the diverse ways in which publics and counter-publics are constituted, challenged, and unmade in and around discussions of freedom of speech. We examine how people seek to render their speech effective in eliciting responses from economically powerful others, how social critique becomes incorporated into the very forces it seeks to challenge, and how states attempt to influence what can be said beyond their boundaries.
Third, we explore the intersection between freedom of speech and historical memory. Chapters in this section examine how different societies use free speech in remembering, witnessing, and working through difficult pasts. We trace how the historical and the personal, event and memory, the collective and the singular are interwoven through practices of speaking freely from South Korean islanders publishing eyewitness accounts of state violence to Syrian documentarists producing narratives of uprising and its aftermath.
Finally, we examine the unexpected connections between therapeutic practices and freedom of speech. Contributors here show how ideas about healing through speaking freely shape both individual and collective transformation, while also exploring the limits and paradoxes of such therapeutic imaginaries. This section ranges from American radio call-in shows to UK psychotherapy practices, from Cold War debates about behaviourism to contemporary Indian discussions of sexuality and gender.
Throughout, our contributors demonstrate that freedom of speech is never a simple matter of removing constraints on expression. Rather, it involves complex negotiations over what can be said, by whom, in what way, and to what effect. The volume argues for moving beyond simplistic debates about censorship versus freedom to examine the varied ways in which societies navigate these questions.
This book represents the culmination of years of research, discussion, and collaboration. During the project, we hosted numerous seminars and masterclasses addressing questions of freedom of speech with prominent anthropologists (including Dominic Boyer, Dace Dzenovska, James Faubion, Jessica Greenberg, Lotte Hoek, Cymene Howe, Douglas Holmes, Webb Keane, Toby Kelly, and Natalia Roudakova), legal scholars (John Bell, Meir Dan-Cohen, Davina Cooper, Ivan Hare, Jake Rowbottom, and Jim Weinstein), and classicists (Mary McCabe). These interdisciplinary conversations hugely enriched our understanding and shaped the comparative framework of the volume. They have also helped us identify three crucial interventions that this book makes in contemporary debates about freedom of speech.
First, through careful ethnographic attention to everyday practices, we show how the stark oppositions that often structure debates about free speech – between individual liberty and social constraint, between Western and non-Western values, between speech and silence – break down on the ground. When we examine how people actually navigate questions of speaking freely in their daily lives, we find nuanced negotiations rather than absolute positions, creative adaptations rather than rigid adherence to abstract principles.
Second, our comparative approach reveals how in different contexts we find sophisticated and often unexpected ways of thinking about and practising freedom of speech. From the complex interplay between speech and silence in Islamic theological debates to the ways in which therapeutic practices reimagine free speech as a tool for both personal and collective healing, our contributors document approaches to speaking freely that challenge and expand conventional Euro-American frameworks. This comparative work is not merely descriptive – it provides concrete examples of alternative ways of conceptualising and organising the relationship between speech, freedom, and constraint.
Third, by examining freedom of speech across such varied contexts, we shed new light on fundamental questions about the relationship between language, power, and human flourishing. Our contributors show how speaking freely (or being prevented from doing so) shapes not only political life but also personal relationships, historical memory, collective identity, and psychological well-being. This broader perspective helps us understand why debates about freedom of speech often become so heated – they touch on fundamental aspects of what it means to be human and to live in society.
These insights come at a crucial moment. Current debates about freedom of speech have become increasingly polarised, often seeming stuck in unproductive binaries between absolute freedom and necessary constraint, between individual rights and collective responsibilities. Much is at stake, politically, but rather than reiterate such arguments, we suggest that anthropological perspectives can help reframe them entirely. The varied cases in our volume demonstrate that there are many more ways of thinking about and practising freedom of speech than current debates typically acknowledge.
We envision this book not as the final word on freedom of speech but as the beginning of a new kind of conversation – one that brings together theoretical sophistication with ethnographic nuance, that places contemporary Euro-American debates in broader comparative perspective, and that remains attentive to both perennial concerns and the specific forms that shape how different people in different contexts imagine and enact the freedom to speak. This conversation has implications not only for scholarly discussions in anthropology, sociology, political science, and communication studies but also for how we think about and practise freedom of speech in our various contemporary contexts.
As new technologies reshape how we communicate, as political polarisation strains our ability to speak across difference, and as global crises demand new forms of collective dialogue and action, the questions our volume raises become ever more pressing. We hope that by documenting the many ways people have found to navigate these challenges, our book can contribute to more nuanced and productive discussions about what it means to speak freely in the contemporary world.
References
Candea, M. 2019. ‘The Duelling Ethic and the Spirit of Libel Law: Matters and Materials of Honour in France’, Law Text Culture, 23, p. 29.
——— 2021. ‘“When I see what democracy is…”: bleak liberalism in a French court’, Social Anthropology, 29(2), pp. 453–470. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13038.
——— 2024. ‘French Law, Danish Cartoons, and the Anthropology of Free Speech’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, pp. 1–28. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417524000252.
Dzenovska, Dace, and Taras Fedirko. 2021. ‘Embattled Futures on the Margins of the Liberal Empire’. Anthropology News Website, October 21, 2021. https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/embattled-futures-on-the-margins-of-the-liberal-empire/.
Fedirko, Taras. 2020. ‘Self-Censorships in Ukraine: Distinguishing between the Silences of Television Journalism’. European Journal of Communication 35 (1): 12–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323119897424.
———. 2021. ‘Liberalism in Fragments: Oligarchy and the Liberal Subject in Ukrainian News Journalism’. Social Anthropology 29 (2): 471–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.13063.
———. 2022. ‘In the Shadow of Power: Ethics and Material Interest in Ukrainian Political Reporting’. L’Homme, no. 243–244, 61–94. https://doi.org/10.4000/lhomme.43812.
———. 2023. ‘Failure and Moral Distinction in a Ukrainian Marketplace of Ideas’. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 29 (S1): 62–78. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13902.
Heywood, P. 2022. Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating “the Everyday” in the Birthplace of Fascism. Comparative Studies in Society and History 64: 91-121.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417521000402
——— 2023. Out of the ordinary: everyday life and the “carnival of Mussolini”. American Anthropologist 125: 493-504.
——— 2024. Burying Mussolini: Ordinary Life in the Shadows of Fascism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Wright, F. 2022. Making Good of Crisis: Temporalities of Care in UK Mental Health Services. Medical Anthropology 41, Article 3
——— forthcoming. The pedagogy of (un)safe spaces and therapeutic speech: Containing the permeable subject in contemporary Britain. Current Anthropology.
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