Freedom of speech takes many forms and they are always cultural

By Matei Candea, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge

In the early 20th century, American anthropologist Franz Boas argued that being free just means being fully in harmony with your culture. The Inuit with whom he had done fieldwork saw themselves as incomparably free, even though he saw them as constrained by traditional rules.

But the opposite was also true: they saw his (freely chosen) decision to live among them as a strange cultural compulsion. For Boas, there is no absolute freedom: “We are…

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