Semiotic ideologies, religious and secular Anthropologists have the resources to examine the varied ways in which free speech is imagined, valued, and practiced as a lived ideal in necessarily compromised and imperfect conditions. Nonetheless, it remains a persistent fact that many of the people anthropologists work with value, desire, or imagine something like freedom of speech as a particular goal, and mourn, fear, or protest its absence. Anthropologists have demonstrated extensive determinations-from grammar to sociolinguistics-that are entailed in any speech act they have pointed to the pervasive and sometimes productive nature of silencing in social life and they have shown the multiple ways in which authoritative speech is entangled in and produced by controls and limitations of other kinds of expression. These comparative explorations tend to challenge the idea that speech can ever be ‘free’ in any simple sense. This allows us to pick out, by contrast, some of the distinctive assumptions embedded in these familiar debates-assumptions about the nature of language, about speaking subjects and the polities they inhabit. Legal scholarship and classical political philosophy have given us more formal representations of this liberal space of disagreement over free speech and its limits.Īnthropologists can make a useful intervention by putting these familiar debates about freedom of speech into a broader comparative frame. Despite appearances, these public debates are therefore still disagreements within, rather than about, a liberal consensus. However they might disagree about the rights and wrongs of specific cases, the debating parties tend-with few exceptions-to subscribe to a familiar liberal vision in which freedom of speech, within certain limits, is broadly speaking good for individuals and polities, while silencing, except in certain carefully delimited cases, is broadly speaking bad. These debates invoke the notion of freedom of speech to apportion blame and responsibility for political injuries, but rarely involve a sustained analysis of the notion of freedom of speech itself. The latter in turn accuse their critics of invoking freedom of speech disingenuously in order to protect established interests. Some fear the rise of a ‘cancel culture’, and accuse proponents of ‘safe spaces’, ‘trigger warnings’, and ‘no-platforming’ of challenging freedom of speech. In recent years, it has become a focus of extensive and embittered debates within the US and Europe. Finally, the entry considers the idea of ‘voice’ as signalling modes of embodiment, and auditory phenomena such as noise, sound, and silence, which are not spoken language but can inform and expand our understanding of free speech.įreedom of speech is a core tenet of liberal political philosophy, and a criterion frequently invoked to distinguish liberal democracies from their political others. Thirdly, it explores the material settings, contexts, or technologies through which free speech is curtailed or realised. It begins by focusing on free speech as a dynamic value or virtue, asking: what is it about ‘free’ or ‘direct’ speech that people value when they value it? Secondly, the entry casts critical light on the idea of an individual as the universal ‘free speaker’, demonstrating how collective or disaggregated subjects can also practice free speech. This entry borrows theoretical perspectives, as well as ethnographic examples produced by anthropologists, to shed light on free speech within a broader comparative frame. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has extensive tools for bringing free speech into view beyond its quality as an abstract ideal or legal category. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts.
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