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by Matei Candea (Editor), Taras Fedirko (Editor), Paolo Heywood (Editor)
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.
Author Biography
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.
