Modalities of Free Speech

While debates over freedom of speech have been a focus of renewed public and media attention over the past decade, anthropological literature focusing self-consciously and explicitly on the topic remained, until very recently, relatively thin on the ground. And yet questions of freedom of expression are treated tangentially in a range of anthropological literatures, including studies of publics, media and mediation, expertise, political subjectivity, or humor. We draw these contributions together to build a synthetic account of what anthropology has had to say—directly or indirectly—about freedom of speech. Building on this literature, the article argues that rather than imagine freedom of speech as the illusory opposite of our preferential understanding of communication as necessarily constrained, a more ethnographic and less parochial approach would seek to interrogate the different modalities in which freedoms of speech are evoked, invoked, imagined, and practiced.