Congratulations to Matei Candea (“French Law, Danish Cartoons, and the Anthropology of Free Speech” (67-1, 2024) and Paolo Heywood (“Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating “the Everyday” in the Birthplace of Fascism” (64-1, 2021) for the publication of their co-edited volume, Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power, with Taras Fedirko and Fiona Wright. Combined Academic Publishers writes of the manuscript,
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.
Kevin P. Donovan (“Uhuru Sasa! Federal Futures and Liminal Sovereignty in Decolonizing East Africa” (65-2, 2023)) has also published a new book, Money, Value, and the State: Sovereignty and Citizenship in East Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2024). The book is described thusly:
Decolonization in East Africa was more than a political event: it was a step towards economic self-determination. In this innovative book, historian and anthropologist Kevin Donovan analyses the contradictions of economic sovereignty and citizenship in Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda, placing money, credit, and smuggling at the center of the region’s shifting fortunes. Using detailed archival and ethnographic research undertaken across the region, Donovan reframes twentieth century statecraft and argues that self-determination was, at most, partially fulfilled, with state monetary infrastructures doing as much to produce divisions and inequality as they did to produce nations. A range of dissident practices, including smuggling and counterfeiting, arose as people produced value on their own terms. Weaving together discussions of currency controls, bank nationalizations and coffee smuggling with wider conceptual interventions, Money, Value and the State traces the struggles between bankers, bureaucrats, farmers and smugglers that shaped East Africa’s postcolonial political economy.
CSSH also congratulates Said Amir Arjomand (“The Law, Agency, and Policy in Medieval Islamic Society: Development of the Institutions of Learning from the Tenth to the Fifteenth Century” (41-2, 1999)) upon the publication of Kings and Dervishes: Sufi World Renunciation and the Symbolism of Kingship in the Persianate World (University of California Press, 2025). The press summarizes:
Saïd Amir Arjomand’s Kings and Dervishes is a pioneering study of the emergence and development of Sufism during the formation of the Persianate world. Whereas Sufi doctrine was expressed in the New Persian language, its social organization was detached from the civic movement among the urban craftsmen and artisans known as the fotovva(t) and was politically shaped by multiple forces—first by the revival of Persian kingship, and then by the emergence of the Turko-Mongolian empires.
The intermingling of Sufism’s developmental path with the transformation of the Persianate political regimes resulted in the progressive appropriation of royal symbols by the Sufi shaykhs. The original Sufi world renunciation gave way first to world accommodation and the medieval love mysticism of Jalāl al-Din Rumi and Hāfez of Shiraz, and then to world domination. This comprehensive work of historical sociology traces these spiritual and political evolutions over the course of some six centuries, showing how the Sufi saints’ symbolic sovereignty was eventually made real in the imperial kingship of the Persianate world’s early modern empires.
