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Studies in the Anthropology of Language, Sign, and Social Life
Freedoms of Speech

Freedoms of Speech

Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power

Edited by Matei Candea, Taras Fedirko, Paolo Heywood and Fiona Wright

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Series: Studies in the Anthropology of Language, Sign, and Social Life

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

478 Pages, 152.00 × 229.00 × 28.00 mm

Paperback
9781487548841
Published: February 2025

£31.00

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Description
Contents
Authors

Bringing together leading anthropologists, this collection sheds light on the vast topic of freedoms of speech from a comparatively human perspective. Freedoms of Speech provides a sustained, empirical exploration of the variety of ways freedom of speech is lived, valued, and contested in practice; envisioned as an ideal; and mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms.

From Ireland to India, from Palestine to West Papua, from contemporary Java to early twentieth-century Britain, and from colonial Vietnam to the contemporary United States, the book broadly interrogates the classic vision of a singular "Western liberal tradition" of freedom of speech, exploring its internal complexities and highlighting alternative perspectives on the relationship between speech, freedom, and constraint in other times and places. Chapters analyse subjects commonly linked to freedom-of-speech debates, shedding new light on familiar topics that include campus speech codes, defamation, and press freedom, while also exploring unexpected ones such as therapy, gift-giving, and martyrdom. These analyses not only provide unexpected perspectives and unique insights but also address a myriad of questions, contributing to a rich, interdisciplinary, and human understanding of the nature of freedom of speech.

Introduction: Anthropologies of Free Speech

Part I: Traditions and Comparisons

1. Comparing Freedoms: "Liberal Freedom of Speech" in Frontal and Lateral Perspective
2. When Speech Isn't Free: Varieties of Metapragmatic Struggle
3. Speaking for Oneself: Language Reform and the Confucian Legacy in Late Colonial Vietnam
4. Risking Speech in Islam
5. Ten-and-a-Half Seconds of God’s Silence: Mormon Parrhesia in the Time of Donald Trump
6. Fascism, Real or Stuffed: Ordinary Scepticism at Mussolini’s Grave
7. The Imaginative Power of Language in the Vacated Space of "Free Speech" in Putin-Era Russia

Part II: Extending the Politics of Free Speech

8. Designing Limits on Public Speaking: The Case of Hungary
9. Expression Is Transaction: Talk, Freedom, and Authority When Egalitarians Embrace the State
10. Dissent, Hierarchy, and Value Creation: Liberalism and the Problem of Critique
11. The People’s Radio between Populism and Bullshit
12. Environments for Expression on Palestine: Fields, Fear, and the Politics of Movement

Part III: Narrating, Witnessing, Troubling

13. Freedom of Speech in Jeju Shamanism
14. Truth of War: Immersive Fiction Reading and Public Modes of Remembrance in an English Literary Society
15. As It Were: Narrative Struggles, Historiopraxy, and the Stakes of the Future in the Documentation of the Syrian Uprising
16. Age of Saturn: Art, Parafiction, Censorship, and the Contested History of Bangladesh

Part IV: Therapies, Individual and Collective

17. Free Speech, without Listening? Liberalism and the Problem of Reception
18. An American Canard: Carl Rogers, B.F. Skinner, and the Freedom of (Therapeutic) Speech
19. Therapeutic Politics and the Performance of Reparation: A Dialogical Approach to Mental Health Care in the UK
20. Secret Censors: Scandals of Sexuality in Global/Indian Publics

Bibliography
Index

Matei Candea is a professor of social anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

Taras Fedirko is a lecturer in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow.

Paolo Heywood is an assistant professor of social anthropology at Durham University.

Fiona Wright is a research fellow at the Advanced Care Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh.