The January 2025 issue of CSSH features an essay by Matei Candea, “French Law, Danish Cartoons, and Free Speech.” It is filled with precedents, legal and analytical. You could read it as a kind of training document. We realize that few of us were ever taught how to do comparative analysis – as a formal technique acquired in a classroom – and careful deliberations on how we compare, or why, are rarely the fun part. Luckily, Candea is good at the doing and the thinking of comparison. He finds inspiration in both, and he braided them together impressively in his book, Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Candea’s work as a journal editor (at JRAI) and his ethnographic research on legal systems have sharpened his sense of what comparison can accomplish. In the following exchange with CSSH editors past (Andrew Shryock) and present (Jatin Dua), Candea makes a strong case for experimentation, for comparison’s scalar potential, and for the need to build larger, collectivist frames that will connect our arguments across time and space. Along the way, Candea conjures up ideas for 3-5 new articles we sincerely hope he (or one of you) will write!
Read on. And enjoy.
Shryock: I’m delighted to see one of your essays in CSSH. You’ve written a lot about comparison. It’s part of everything you do, whether you’re describing Corsican nationalists, or French journalists and judges, or behavioral ecologists who study meerkats. It’s hard to believe you’ve never published in CSSH. Welcome!
Candea: Thank you so much for inviting me! Actually, publishing in CSSH has been one of my life-long ambitions. As a very green PhD student 20 years ago, I submitted a half-baked paper to CSSH which was (rightly) rejected, but with some of the most generous, on-point, and formative feedback I’ve ever had. That experience left CSSH as a kind of lodestar in my anthropological sky. Good things come to those who wait.
Shryock: They do. And your first CSSH essay appears in the first issue overseen by our new editor, Jatin Dua. Welcome to you both!
Dua: Thanks. This is an absolute pleasure. I want to emphasize how great it was to work with your piece. Beyond the rich ethnography of the court case, which is fascinating in itself, you successfully challenge what a reader might imagine the stakes of “free speech” to be in a liberal context. The article makes us mindful of how and, importantly, where we draw the boundaries of comparison. I’m excited to think through all of this and to chat with you about editing as an exercise in comparison. Now that I’m shepherding manuscripts through our review process, the puzzle of what makes an article a CSSH article is very much on my mind.
Candea: Thank you, Jatin. From my side, I want to say what a pleasure it was to be on the author end of the deal. Insightful and sharp reviews which really enhanced the piece, awesome editorial input, and a super smooth and quick publishing process. This is how every journal should feel!
Dua: That’s wonderful to hear.
Candea: As for the paper, you’ve hit the nail on the head: it really is meant as an experiment with comparative form. So much of our popular and even academic thinking about free speech takes a binary comparative form: us versus them, what I have elsewhere called a “frontal comparison.” Whichever side one happens to be on, arguments about free speech in liberal settings seem to have only two sides: either we are those who truly value individual freedom and they are the collectivist censors, or we are those who are aware of the social power and danger of words and they are antisocial free speech absolutists. Despite the hugely varied empirical situations in which free speech debates arise, the specificity tends to get swept away and we come back to this binary form: on the one hand individual freedom, on the other a concern for the social. If those are the options, anthropologists are going to want to be on the latter side, of course – and much useful anthropological thinking on free speech has come from this type of contextualization. But I wondered if we could contextualize in a slightly different way. What if instead of counting to two, we counted to three (or more)? The article returns to a free speech controversy which is often seen as deeply binary: the Danish cartoons affair, and within it, the trial of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo for republishing the offending cartoons. These events are often taken as the epitome of a clash between “western liberal individual freedom” and “Islamic values.” Rather than follow that line, the article tries to unpack some of the very different ways in which freedom of speech is evoked and imagined as the trial unfolds.
Shryock: That’s the beauty of it. You’re doing something anthropologists seldom do. You’re taking apart a nominally European, or Western, value by locating variation within it, not by contrasting it to alternatives drawn from “other cultures.” Freedom of speech is not a singularity in your essay. It’s a coalescence of several values: commitments to honor, reason, and carnivalesque expression. These interact across multiple contexts, and they’re often at odds. In the Charlie Hebdo trial, the decision-making process made “reason” the dominant mode – the context was legal, after all, and involved judges – but issues of honor and the right to engage in transgressive forms of expression were also woven into the deliberations. By highlighting these internal variations in what free speech means in France, you show how distorted the results will be if we try to understand differences in ideas of acceptable or protected speech – e.g., “can one draw and publish a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad?” – by contrasting a European notion of freedom to a set of nominally Muslim ones. This is a very effective way of anthropologizing Europe without essentializing it. Or even provincializing it, really.
Candea: I wonder about that. Is the sort of move I’m making in this piece still part of the “provincializing” intellectual tradition? I had always thought so (clearly free speech doesn’t emerge from this work as a cosmopolitan universal), but I can see your point. It’s true that, as part of my earlier work in the anthropology of science, I came away with the sense that everything is already provincialized, as it were. Even universalizing horizons (objectivity, detachment, Nature, etc.) are always seen from somewhere, and often self-consciously so. The behavioral scientists I worked with didn’t believe they were objective – they just assessed their own specific situated failings in light of that ideal. But most of them also saw the ideal itself as situated or specific, not something everyone strives after, or even the only thing they themselves cared about in their everyday lives, when they were not “being scientists.” By the time I got to it, objectivity was already provincialized. And I think the same – for better or worse – is true of freedom of speech. It’s already widely invoked as a value “from somewhere.” Arguing that free speech is a provincial concern is, to use a French idiom, like battering down an open door. In sum, I think you’re right, this is not really about provincializing. It’s about attending to a multiplicity that doesn’t sit neatly within any specific province.
Dua: And it’s not about adding “voices from elsewhere” to the mix, which would have been a more conventional approach. I’m intrigued by the anthropological needle you thread in this piece. Not essentializing (in your critique of anthropology) and not provincializing (as a form of social critique). Did you always intend to come at these problems using comparison as a tool? It’s an old tool. But you seem to be doing something new and unexpected with it here.
Candea: This argument builds on my earlier work on comparison, and particularly on the contrast between frontal and lateral comparison which I drew out in various places. That work was in a very direct way a preliminary to this project: I had always been interested in the heuristics of anthropology, but what sharpened my focus on comparison was having to write the proposal for the European Research Council grant on freedom of speech which funded the research in this article. Suddenly, I was applying to “lead a team,” with post-doctoral researchers funded to pursue a collective – and therefore necessarily comparative – project. And I realized that comparative method hadn’t really featured as an explicit part of my training at either undergraduate or postgraduate level. Lots of critiques of older comparative imaginaries, but few proposals for what comparison might do. So figuring out comparison was a preliminary to doing it, before it became a conceptual project in its own right.
To come back to frontal and lateral, the core point was that the kind of us-them comparative move which anthropologists are so fond of making (which we find epitomized in the ontological turn, but also in other ethnographic claims to challenging “liberal assumptions”) is a heuristic device with its own strengths and weaknesses. Another heuristic device is lateral comparison, in which “cases” are laid out side by side, to form a series, or a table of micro contrasts and similarities. Frontal comparison has been in the limelight for much of the history of the discipline, because it places the observer in the mix, and is therefore reflexive, self-critical, and showcases the power of ethnography to reveal the new. Lateral comparison by contrast is more laborious, less shiny, and has sometimes been associated with the hubris of a disembodied perspective: anthropology as a god’s-eye view, a systematizing project. But in practice the two kinds of comparative heuristic coexist in every anthropological argument: a frontal contrast is teased out of ethnography, something unexpected is brought in to challenge the reader’s assumptions, and then stabilized through lateral comparisons from across the literature. Or lateral comparisons of many ethnographic experiences, moments and encounters, build up to a striking frontal comparison which unsettles and recasts some previously taken-for-granted theoretical perspective. That sort of thing. But each device has its distinctive zones of invisibility – shifting the emphasis from one to the other can reveal new things.
This article in CSSH was my first attempt to put my money where my mouth is, as it were, and demonstrate the applicability of those rather abstract thoughts to my own material. What is revealed if we shift emphasis away from the frontal comparison between liberal and Muslim semiotic ideologies – the kind of contrast central to the work of Talal Asad (2013) and Saba Mahmood (2013) on this subject – toward a more lateral approach to varieties of liberal “structures of plausibility” (a term I borrow from Michael Carrithers) about freedom of speech?
Shryock: But there’s a problem you’ve not solved, which might be a European one. Your comparative analysis still has an “outside,” which plays an unstated, or muted role as contrast. French ideas of free speech are being defined, by you and by the court, against ideas certain Muslim communities have about how and whether one can criticize the Prophet Muhammad. These Muslim ideas are now located in France, in Europe. But even when French lawyers argue for them in court, we can hear Talal Asad reminding us, almost as an expert witness, that Muslims and their views are not considered authentically European, and they will not be protected as such. You’re clear that Muslim traditions are also internally variable and complex, but you are not writing about them. They remain undifferentiated. What if you did write about them? Could your approach be equally effective as a way of anthropologizing European Muslims without essentializing or provincializing them? Is that a fair question? It seems that comparative projects always have political stakes built in.
Candea: It’s a very fair question, and one which some reviewers have also asked. Almost every article is faced with such questions about what is not included, and the usual answer to these kinds of questions (“the paper was already pushing the word limit, I didn’t have space to deal with that added complexity, etc.”) is unsatisfactory, because it glides past the obvious: why these exclusions, rather than those exclusions?
A rather better answer, I think, is to highlight that anthropology is a conversation, a collective comparative endeavor between scholars whose individual expertise is limited. This is perhaps obvious, but we tend to forget it, when articles are implicitly or explicitly presented as the final word on any given topic. The aim of this article is emphatically not to close the conversation on free speech, liberalism and Islam, or the Danish cartoons even, but to take it forward from one empirical “knowledge point.” My ethnographic work was with French judges and lawyers, and that is the expertise underlying this paper. I feel I can speak with some authority about the complexities and contradictions in the perspectives of the people involved in “speaking French law” – including some who are Muslim and/or see themselves as defending Muslim interests. By the same token, I am not the best candidate to write with authority about the variability and complexity internal to Muslim traditions and semiotic ideologies – this is not where my ethnographic expertise lies. However, thankfully, others are and have done. Asad’s account of the variety of Islamic legal notions underlying what liberal commentators gloss as “blasphemy” (Asad 2013), Mayanthi Fernando’s (2014) exploration of the complexities and tensions inherent in Muslim French approaches to secularism, or, most recently, Ali-Reza Bhojani and Morgan Clarke’s work (2025) on different approaches to free, challenging, and pedagogical speech in a Twelver Shi’i Muslim community in the UK are all examples of anthropologists doing this kind of work, which is neither essentializing nor provincializing, and which informs my own arguments. This paper is my – partial and inherently limited – contribution to that broader discussion, and I hope it can act as a prompt for others to ask and answer other questions.
Shryock: My question is proof that your prompt is working!
Candea: And maybe these questions don’t need to take the form of a back and forth between “liberal” and “Muslim” contexts. The gambit in this paper was that by digging deep within what looks like one side of a dispute (the “liberal” as opposed to the “Muslim” side), the whole vision of sides from which we started might actually emerge challenged.
Shryock: Well, probably not in the language of the courtroom itself, which needs sides, which needs adversaries, but definitely in the concepts and historical forces that bring certain parties, certain claims, before the court.
Candea: Exactly! This is what I index – perhaps too fleetingly – at the end of the paper. That, for instance, the concern with “honor” internal to French liberal law might actually have deep historical entanglements with the concern with insult and respect that Saba Mahmood has described as animating Muslim responses to the cartoons. Or that – as Bhojani and Clarke suggest – the vision of a confrontational public pedagogy that some defenders of the cartoons put forward to justify themselves, might share conceptual roots with certain Islamic visions of morally efficacious speech, such as a duty to “command the right and forbid the wrong.” Internal multiplicities can double up as external relations.
Shryock: That’s a powerful formulation. We’d love to see more papers that explore “deep historical entanglements” in precisely this way.
Candea: I would, too.
Shryock: You mentioned that your paper comes out of a research project. A big one. Tell us more about it.
Candea: From 2016 to 2022, I ran a research project called “Risking Speech,” funded by an ERC consolidator grant. The core team was made up of myself and three brilliant postdoctoral researchers, Paolo Heywood, Taras Fedirko, and Fiona Wright, and the aim was to compare the semiotics, ethics, and materiality of freedom of speech in a range of European locations and beyond. Our starting point was the observation that if anthropology teaches us anything, it is that speech is not free. Speech is always-already limited, constrained and enabled by silences, structures and formalisms at every scale – grammar, register, deference, politeness, relevance, etc. And yet, so many people in different settings demand free speech, hope for it, seek to instantiate it, feel and mourn its absence. The handful of anthropological writings on freedom of speech by that point had tended to focus, in fact, on the many unfreedoms of speech – demonstrating the ubiquitous and sometimes productive nature of constraints on speech, and deconstructing “liberal free speech talk” to show its often problematic political and philosophical implications. We wanted to do something slightly different. Rather than dismiss free speech as a mere political fiction, we asked what happens if you take invocations, practices, and desires around freedom of speech seriously. What actual semiotic forms, what techniques of the self, what kinds of material devices do people deploy or contest, as they pursue their various understandings of freedom of speech?
The core comparative focus of the grant was on Europe. I worked on free speech law in France and spent a few years in and out of the Parisian “Chamber of the press and public liberties” – the court which administers the iconic French 1881 law on the freedom of the press. Paolo Heywood worked on Predappio, town of Mussolini’s birth and burial. Alongside the aggressive and histrionic demonstrations of “free speech” by fascist sympathizers who flood the town on a regular basis, Paolo focused on the subtle ways in which Predappio locals tried to free themselves from injunctions to speak about their history in a certain way, in order to establish a kind of everyday normality amidst the ruins of fascism. Some of this work was featured in a recent CSSH special issue, which Paolo co-edited with Adam Reed.
Shryock: That was an intriguing set of papers. We had a follow-up conversation with a few of the authors on our website.
Candea: Paolo has just published a monograph with Cornell UP, entitled Burying Mussolini. Taras Fedirko (e.g. 2021) worked with Ukrainian journalists as they navigated and refigured the meaning of free speech in the context of changing professional standards, pressures from oligarchic media owners, EU funded civil society training programs, and the “information war” that preceded the 2022 Russian invasion. Fiona Wright’s project was on therapeutic understandings of free speech (e.g. 2025). She studied a new form of psychotherapeutic practice in the UK known as “Open Dialogue,” which connects personal healing to the reshaping of what can be said and who should listen, in both family settings and in the broader institutional settings of mental healthcare. Her work sheds fascinating comparative light on the therapeutic implications embedded in discussions of “safe spaces” and the new politics of listening that accompanied the iconic campus free speech debates of the 2010s.
Beyond the four core cases, the “Risking Speech” project was also designed to serve as a platform to bring together anthropologists interested in rethinking the question of free speech from several different theoretical and empirical directions. Bhojani and Clarke’s work on Islamic traditions of public pedagogy, mentioned above, was part of this.
Shryock: Bhojani and Clarke appeared recently in CSSH as well. An article and a fascinating discussion of how they collaborate. We’re reaping the benefits of your research.
Candea: I’m thrilled to hear it. Some of our work is showcased in a large open-access edited volume that’s just been published by Toronto University Press, called Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological perspectives on language, ethics and power.
Throughout, what we tried to do was to multiply the ways in which freedom of speech could be contextualized and recontextualized anthropologically, beyond a deconstruction of “free speech talk.”
Shryock: Attention to context is crucial to your essay. For the judges in the Charlie Hebdo case, context is the environment in which they decide. They start by “reminding us of the facts.” Those become your facts, too. You deploy them in your own way, but you pay attention to them. A good comparative analysis is often mimetic of, or even isomorphic with, the patterns it studies. Many of our best papers at CSSH are about legality and law. Clearly, there’s a productive resemblance between what lawyers and judges do and what comparative analysts do. You come across more as a jurist than as a masked reveler at a carnival or a duelist who risks his life for his honor. Should we find that promising or disturbing? The juridical likeness works as a support for the analysis.
Candea: There’s a long history there. Some of the most innovative 20th century anthropological thinking about comparison came out of the Manchester school’s work on African law, and the problem of “cases” and contexts. Sociologists and anthropologists of law have often written about the problematic echoes and entanglements between their own knowledge practices and those of legal scholars, lawyers, and judges.
I think these comparisons can tell us a lot about the way anthropologists work with context. In an earlier version of the article (one which broke even CSSH’s generous word limit!), I came back at the end to a comparison between the contextualizing moves of the judges in the Danish cartoons case, and those of anthropological commentators like Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood. Both, I felt, spoke to a double audience. For the benefit of a broad public, the ruling projects some sociological generalizations about national context (“France is a secular and pluralist society” etc.). Yet to the eye of a French legal scholar, the ruling is making a much more subtle argument, weaving carefully through precedents that are never explicitly cited yet are indexed through implicit quotation here and there. These are past rulings which everyone in the field of French press law knows, some of which were more restrictive and some more permissive when it comes to religious insult. The ruling speaks a double language: to insiders it indexes a careful balancing act within a complex and shifting field; to outsiders it projects large-scale certainties about France, freedom, and secularism. Looking back at anthropological comparisons from this vantage, it struck me that Asad and Mahmood do something similar: to anthropological readers who are attuned to critiques of cultural essentialism, the contrasts these authors draw between liberal and Islamic semiotic ideologies are clearly to be taken with a pinch of salt. Their accounts are peppered with subtle caveats, and there is a broad sense in which anthropologists are trained to assume that such frontal contrasts are in some sense heuristic devices, not be taken entirely literally. Yet to those reading them from outside the discipline, Asad and Mahmood can seem to speak of a stark civilizational or even ontological contrast.
Shryock: I encounter this response whenever I teach them. It’s standard.
Candea: Even a sympathetic and hardly unsophisticated reader like Judith Butler reads them as talking about “the conditions of cohabitation for peoples whose fundamental conceptions of subjective life divide between those that accept established secular grounds and those at odds with secular presumptions of self-coincidence and property” (in Asad et al. 2013, 120). This is not, I think, a coincidence or a misfire, but rather something deeply embedded in some anthropological forms of argument: the stark claim of alterity is how these arguments manage to pack a critical punch for a wider audience. And yet these stark claims are simultaneously caveated and softened, as it were, for a professional audience “in the know.” Anthropologists and lawyers are both adepts of these types of careful play with audience and context.
Shryock: You’ve just built the framework for another essay. “On Critical Punch.” If someone else writes it first, I hope they give you a shout-out in their acknowledgements.
Candea: Or they can ping me an email and we can write it together! But I realize that – like a lawyer? – I’ve dodged your question. Yes, there is certainly something jurist-like about my own writing in this piece. The careful “on the one hand, on the other hand,” and my own plays with context. When you spend a long time with lawyers and their documents, it’s hard not to be captured by the technical artifices of what Bruno Latour (2009) calls “speaking legally” – this ability of legal actors to reshape the world without ever seeming to leave the confines of dry, technical debates on detail. That being said, there are echoes of “carnival” and “honor,” too in anthropological arguments, mine included. Carnival is the perpetual anthropological aesthetic of overturning, desacralizing, and challenging: you thought this, well let me tell you that. And honor? Well, the back and forth of academic debate, the way we challenge each other, or give each other props through citation and acknowledgements, carries with it the echoes of the giving and taking of regard, respect, and reputation, this vision of an agonistic exchange between persons whose value is indexed to the worth of their word. But yes, on balance, the law is the closest analogue here.
Dua: There’s certainly a seduction to the law. I’ll admit feeling a kinship to jurists and their modes of reasoning. Jurists toggle between the particular and the universal. Context matters in explicit and implicit ways for them, as it does for anthropologists. We’re all comparativists, reminding the world that things can be otherwise.
Shryock: Didn’t you study law, Jatin? Are you a reliable witness?
Dua: Objection! It’s something I like to forget, but it pops up in often-unexpected ways. The case method of the Manchester School that Matt referred to, the collaborations between the earlier Boasians like Hoebel and the legal realist Karl Llewellyn that led to the Cheyenne Way and, many say, influenced Llewellyn’s idea of law when he was drafting the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) – all of this reveals a rich back and forth between the traditions. The directionality of influence has changed over the years. Today, jurists have shifted their interest somewhat from anthropology to behavioral economics, but anthropologists are still classic expert witnesses for the law. In my own ethnographic research, I find that my interlocutors are constantly thinking about law and law-like things (contracts, promises, kinship, ransoms). So the law is never far away. Comparativism across multiple scales is at the heart of these judicial and quasi-judicial processes. But a tension I’ve never been able to satisfactorily resolve is the power of the as if in legal comparison. The jurists will tell you they understand that the world is complicated, but legal reasoning is about an enclosure around a certain set of facts. They proceed as if the world is divided into free speech and its detractors and then they reason based on that distinction.
At CSSH we’ve published wonderful pieces that emphasize how Islam, for example, is a contested terrain across time and space. There are wine-drinking Muslims and sober ones. There are communist Muslims and anti-communist Muslims, and both can be Sufis. Yet, if the authors who wrote about these variations were to appear as expert witnesses in a court of law, legal reasoning would require them to align with plaintiffs or defendants; it would also require a consensus on the injury at stake. Law requires a decision, and here the waffling historian or anthropologist may find themselves at odds with the legal project, or with the language of the jurist. Or worse, the jurist will say, “yes, but let’s act as if all good French citizens believe in freedom of speech.”
Shryock: And despite all the artifice, a jurist’s decision is binding in ways a scholar’s argument is not. Probably a good thing! Our arguments might be compelling, but that’s a quality based on a different kind of evaluation.
Candea: Indeed. In some ways it’s precisely the explicitness of the artifice which establishes the binding nature of the law – a point made in different ways by Yan Thomas, Bruno Latour or Justin Richland. That “as if” is key. Anthropologists do it too, as I suggested earlier: “let’s write as if liberalism had just one main language ideology,” etc. But the law’s “as if” has bite, I think, precisely because it’s not claiming to be an approximation of something else, like sociological reality, say. It just builds an alternative, seemingly self-referential world, and then imposes it outwards. This is what judges do with the difficult sociological notion of honor that is explicitly built into French libel law. When I asked them how they decide, in a libel case, whether an alleged behavior is dishonorable, they typically replied that most dishonorable behavior is also illegal, so they usually just need to decide if the alleged behavior is illegal. And so we are safely back within the self-referentiality of the law. That self-referentiality is leaky, of course. Some dishonorable acts are not illegal, and that’s where things get interesting from an anthropological point of view.
Shryock: Let’s consider another juridical likeness. You’ve spent a lot of time considering how judges reason. You’ve also spent a lot of time giving reasons for your own judgements! You were, for several years, the editor of one of the world’s best anthropology journals, JRAI. Being an editor is basically a gig that requires a lot of applied comparison. Weighing trends. Sifting. And most of all, being in a position to see patterns.
Candea: Absolutely!
Shryock: I’d like to pass this conversation now to Jatin, and I’ll do so with a question you can answer, so to speak, in his direction. What kind of comparative insights did you gain from processing so many manuscripts? There’s the knowledge contained in the hundreds of essays themselves, but there’s also the sense of what a discipline is up to, what it can do, what it’s consistently not doing. You must have seen something important, because you immediately went off and wrote a monster book on, of all things, comparison! [Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method]. We doubt that’s a coincidence! Share some revelations with our new editor.
Dua: Yes. I’m all ears. Editing a journal with comparative in the title, we often get queries from potential authors about whether their work is “comparative enough.” I’m curious to hear your thoughts on what makes an argument comparative. Aren’t they all? Relatedly, one exciting challenge in editing a storied interdisciplinary journal that isn’t limited by area or historical period is the work of moving across the micro and macro, the empirical and conceptual. You’ve written about the need for caution when engaging certain kinds of scale-free abstractions in your work on hospitality, and I wonder if and how the question of scale is a valuable one from an editorial perspective? CSSH has been a home for big ideas drawn across a broad canvas (our word limit is certainly the most generous around), but it’s also home to work located in very specific places, archives, and epistemologies. The best papers move seamlessly across these domains, but there’s an art and a risk entailed in this kind of movement. How did you manage these kinds of scalar jumps?
Candea: More than anything, I think what the JRAI gig attuned me to was how to pay attention to form. As you say, there’s a particular formal aesthetic to articles in journals like CSSH and JRAI, which have to be substantively empirical and conceptually transformative at the same time. Hitting that balance is a difficult art, and it’s also a difficult art to judge whether it’s been hit. But in my experience, this is where the collective nature of our discipline – the way we all participate in a conversation, but each from a knowingly limited ethnographic or archival vantage – becomes so helpful. As an editor, you “judge” a paper, sure, but more than this, you have to assess, make sense of, and orchestrate a set of judgments by others. For me the sense of whether a particular paper hit that golden mean of empirical-cum-conceptual form was fundamentally shaped by the way it managed to engage reviewers with cross-cutting regional, thematic, and theoretical expertise. Can this article simultaneously convince someone whose ethnographic expertise overlaps with the author’s, while managing to engage someone who works on something completely different? For me, that was one of the key formal indicators of a promising piece. And that, of course, is an effect of scale: speaking on more than one scale at the same time, making readers travel from one scale to the other. In my experience, the hardest and most rewarding bit of the editor’s job was to help an author develop that kind of scalar facility.
And this often means mediating and judging the reviews as much as you judged the piece itself. This is a key lesson I took from my predecessor in the role, Matthew Engelke: each reviewer sees the piece from their own perspective and expertise, and if an author tried to satisfy them all, most often a piece would end up bloated, and lose its focus. The editor’s role, as Matthew taught me to see it, is to take responsibility for a selection – to judge which of the reviewers’ desiderata to emphasize and which to leave as suggestions. To set up a rich microcosm of crosscutting anthropological judgements and then to arbitrate it back into a singular, precise set of recommendations that an author can productively engage with or – just as productively – push back against.
Dua: That’s such an insightful way to think about the moment of editorial excitement and trepidation when you get the automated email saying all reviews have been turned in and a decision is due!
Candea: Yes. It was this experience, even more than the sheer amount of anthropology I read during those years, that most influenced my outlook in the book on comparison. One of the key take-away messages in that book is that the knottiest epistemological problems of comparison (what counts as a “unit”? What about the politics of interlocution? Where can one ever compare “from”?) are much easier to resolve if we move beyond the figure of the lone anthropologist designing and performing comparisons through some feat of singular autonomous genius, between “the field” and “the desk.” The experience of editorship gave me a new appreciation for the modest spaces in which our disciplinary collective is knotted together: not just the field and the desk, but peer review, seminars, doctoral supervisions, Q&As, and ad hoc catch-ups in conference hotel corridors – or indeed, exchanges like this one! In all these moments, comparison is already there, it preexists any individual attempt. Anthropologists don’t define their “objects” of comparison ab initio; we inherit them from others, transform, challenge, and refigure them. We don’t sit alone in judgment on the adequacy of our ethical engagements, we are drawn into them in the field but also by responsibilities to and challenges from colleagues near and far. Anthropology, if it is anything, is already a massively comparative collective project. At certain crunch-points (publishing articles and books, in particular) we condense this collective endeavor into a personal individual point and take responsibility (honor again?) for that narrowing. But those are just moments, and ultimately fleeting ones. Comparison abides.
Dua: Your foregrounding of ethical commitments makes me want to ask another question about anthropology and its political imaginary.One of the things I really appreciated about your piece (or at least read into your piece!) is your commitment to more than simply provincializing anthropology or the kinds of categories that Trouillot (2002) called North Atlantic universals. I think anthropologists are very good at particularizing “universals,” at emphasizing their limits and internal contradictions. We’re ideally suited to do this, and at some level, I’m fully on board with the project of Provincializing Europe (Chakrabarty 2000). But I’m curious to know where you think a project like yours fits within a broader call to decolonize (our disciplines, our journals, our epistemologies)? Do you think decolonizing and provincializing are the same thing?
Shryock: Let me add on. You’re working across real power differentials. How do you manage that in your comparisons? Can you?
Candea: My feeling is that – at least on a topic like freedom of speech – the most pressing horizon for a decolonial anthropology is not necessarily to provincialize. Challenging universals and situating them is important, but after all, those who want to stand for the canon can be just as chauvinistic in defense of values they claim as provincially their own, as they can be tone-deaf in pursuing what they think of as universals. Perhaps a more profoundly decolonial agenda, to my mind, would be to unearth the multiple sources of concern with freedom of speech that exist outside the western canon. This is what philosopher Richard Sorabji (2021) does when he challenges the usual Eurocentric litany (ancient Greece, 18th Century Britain, the First amendment) by tracing alternative visions of free speech in Ashoka’s edicts in India in 300 BCE, or the pursuit of religious and philosophical freedom in sixth-century Persia or tenth-century Baghdad.
As for my own work, I’m limited, once again, by my ethnographic expertise, in what I can talk about with some semblance of authority, namely French law and self-consciously “western liberal” visions of free speech. This is a limited account. It’s not really working across the very clear systemic power differentials between say, the French judiciary system and everyday French Muslims, but rather working up – studying up – into the first branch of that contrast. Within those limits, however, I feel I can contribute to the broader decolonial project by exploring internal multiplicities. The point is not just to unsettle the univocality of the liberal canon. It is also, potentially, to open up new avenues of connection and recombination with other traditions. As Achille Mbembe wrote “The Western archive … contains within itself the resources of its own refutation. It is neither monolithic, nor the exclusive property of the West.” (2015).
Dua: There’s certainly a multi-directionality to this story as well as a need to find ways out of a quagmire. In the name of decolonizing, we often end up reifying the West as the sole universal. And the problems of power and difference are still there in the end.
Candea: The truth is, I have yet to see a piece of anthropological writing that is truly adequate to the power differentials embedded in the world we live in and write about. I’m not talking about the vehemence with which an author expresses outrage at an unjust state of affairs. I think the issue of adequacy to injustice is elsewhere. I’m with Latour here, in his critique of sociological denunciation: I think the ability of a text to engage with power differentials or injustice shouldn’t be judged by its denunciatory style, but by its concrete performative effects. It’s a matter of ontological politics. We’re all in the business of incrementally changing the world as we describe it – are we changing it for the better? I hope that proposing a less dualistic understanding of free speech might be working in the right direction, potentially one which allies with at least some decolonial projects. But still, as Latour reminds us, our ability to act through our texts is extremely limited. We might hope to incrementally shift the way a few people who happen to read us or hear us, or train with us, see the world and engage with it. That’s why anthropological texts can hardly ever claim to be adequate responses to power differentials – and being aware of that inadequacy can in itself be a valuable prompt.
Dua: That’s a good point. And we don’t always have to choose between denunciation and description. There are other games in town, as you show in your article. One of the strengths of a journal like CSSH is the ability to reveal, through meticulous sleuthing, the unlikely kinds of historical entanglements and relations that make up things. Articles written in this style are counter-intuitive, and they’re unsettling in a very productive way. They don’t wear denunciation on their sleeve, but in thinking and teaching with them, I’ve seen how deeply transformative they can be in classrooms and other spaces.
Shryock: I second that, Jatin. Both as a general trend in our essays and as a particular strength of Matt’s article.
Candea: *blush*
Shryock: Do we push hard enough for this transformative effect? What are your thoughts, Matt, on new, experimental forms of comparison? You recently contributed to Porous Becomings, a volume on Michel Serres, a French philosopher who does a lot of work on human relations with other-than-human systems, with universes. He often attempts a kind of wild comparison, more in the spirit of analogy or association than careful juxtaposition. He’s not careful. He likens modern science to the Catholic Church, the exploding Space Shuttle to a burning pagan god, information systems to angels, humans to parasites (on each other and the worlds around us). It’s a kind of seeing through analogy; the angels and the internet suddenly make new sense. Serres makes his readers complicit in this process. He makes you do a lot of the comparison yourself, once he establishes the analogy.
We vex a lot about the careful aspects of comparison. That’s one of our juridical tendencies. What about the more suggestive, analogical way Serres offers? Dare we go there?
Candea: Yes, I do think there’s room for play in comparison and not just hard work! To my mind, Serres is productive for the same reasons he is problematic: that almost carnivalesque unboundedness and lightness of touch. It’s the very opposite of the mid-20th century anthropological desire for “controlled comparison.” This is uncontrolled comparison! It’s like Serres is trying to turn back the clock on the big modernist epistemic transformation Foucault writes about – the rise of “the classical episteme” when wild analogy becomes suspicious and “every resemblance must be subjected to proof by comparison.” (1970:55)
Shryock: He does come across as a time traveler.
Candea: But of course you can never turn back the clock. Serres is after modernist comparison, without really being post-modern either. He sits oddly athwart our usual assumptions about how “theory” is supposed to work, and how we might put it to use in anthropology. Serres’ thought is demanding precisely because it doesn’t provide ready-made categories or conceptual schemes you can “apply” to ethnography in a straightforward way. Rather, it requires the reader to get involved, to be transformed by an insight, a glimpsed analogy (or contrast – I’m thinking, for instance, of his contrast between the fullness of Chinese field systems and the gaps in French ones, in Detachment) which then must be rendered specific in a new context.
Shryock: He had me transposing angels and graveyards onto Bedouin oral traditions, with moments of arc welding. It was insane; it felt insane; but it also felt remarkably true to the material and to forms of knowledge I’d suppressed in earlier work.
Candea: In my contribution to that volume, I argued this is what makes Serres’ writing – for better or worse – more akin to “wisdom literature” than to standard theory or philosophy. He works through exemplary figures (“the parasite” of course, which you so brilliantly put to work, but also “Thumbelina,” “the Hominescent,” etc.). Serres tells stories where others build systems, and he’s more concerned with producing a transformation in his readers than with “transmitting knowledge.” There are echoes of these “wisdom-like” sensibilities in anthropology too.
Shryock: It’s something I’d like to see more of in CSSH, but it’s hard to put out a call for “wisdom literature” or “wild comparison.” We’d need a whole new breed of peer reviewer!
Candea: It’s odd, isn’t it? Calling something or someone wise is both a mark of praise and strangely corny. But we know it when we see it. I won’t embarrass colleagues and interlocutors by naming all of the wise people I’ve learned from, worked with, been reviewed by – but they are out there. And systemically, in the discipline, there’s a wisdom-like dynamic to the way anthropological comparisons require you to sit with places (cf. Basso 1996), with cases and biographies – to attend to why the specifics matter and to be transformed by that attention. This kind of careful, open attention to what matters tends to fall out of the picture when people draw sharp contrasts between anthropology as “detached scholarship” versus anthropology as “engaged activism.”
Shryock: “Transformed by Attention.” Another essay for your writing calendar!
Dua: And while you’re working on that one, what about book projects? Do you have more write-up plans for “Risking Speech”?
Candea: Right now, I’m revising the manuscript of a trade book with Penguin on freedom of speech, which is intended to speak to a broader audience than my usual writing – an exciting and daunting prospect! In parallel, I’m working on a more conventionally anthropological book that comes directly out of my own research project on the Parisian chamber of the press and public liberties: a historical ethnography of the 1881 press law, which is also an ethnography of the transformations of French liberalism and the enduring place of exception and the exceptional at the heart of legal regimes.
Dua: Before you go, could you give me some editorial advice for the road? What should I look for? What would you like to see more of in the journal? Now’s your chance.
Candea: If this were any other journal, I’d say: “more comparison!” But this hardly applies :). More meerkats? Seriously, though, I can’t think of a single thing I would change about CSSH, either as an author or as a reader. It’s classic and yet unique. It was one of my models when I ran JRAI and yet it’s just inimitably itself, and always on the move. Maybe some things are incomparable after all.
Bibliography
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Wright, F. (2025) ‘Therapeutic Politics and the Performance of Reparation: A Dialogical Approach to Mental Health Care in the UK’, in M. Candea et al. (eds) Freedoms of Speech: Comparative perspectives on language, ethics and power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Matei Candea is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge, and Fieldwork (Indiana University Press, 2010), Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and the editor (with Paolo Heywood, Taras Fedirko, and Fiona Wright) of Freedoms of Speech: Comparative Perspectives on Language, Ethics and Power (University of Toronto Press 2025).
Andrew Shryock, a former editor of CSSH, is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is author of Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination: Oral History and Textual Authority in Tribal Jordan (University of California Press, 1997), editor of Islamophobia/Islamophilia: Beyond the Politics of Enemy and Friend (Indiana University Press, 2010), and co-author (with Daniel Lord Smail) of Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (California University Press, 2011).
Jatin Dua, Editor of CSSH, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Captured at Sea: Piracy and Protection in the Indian Ocean (University of California Press, 2019).
