ABSTRACT
It should come as a surprise that, as James Laidlaw says, “freedom is a concept about which anthropology has had strikingly little to say.” (Laidlaw, 2002, 2013) In fact, the number of works that directly address freedom as either an anthropological problem for investigation, or a tool for making sense of ethnographic data, can be held in one hand. Of course there are dozens of related concepts that interest anthropologists, but freedom as such is more likely to have ideological contempt, rhetorical abuse or studied negligence heaped upon it than it is to be taken seriously. Contrast this with the fields of political theory, philosophy and history. Any medium-sized library is stocked with titles like A Theory of Freedom, Dimensions of Freedom, Freedom and Rights, Liberalism and Freedom, Political Freedom, etc. There are readers and edited volumes and special issues of journals to beat the band; there are superstar historians of the concept such as Eric Foner and Orlando Patterson; there are obligatory distinctions and debates and typologies (two concepts of freedom, four concepts of freedom; negative, positive, republican, deterministic); there is even a 15-volume series called The Making of Modern Freedom that includes books on freedom from the medieval era to the present and includes books on China, Asia, Africa, slavery, migration and fiscal crises. Across these fields, the concept has seen refinement and debate, resulting in some distinctions that I argue should be of interest to anthropologists – both because they are analytically useful and because they signal a pattern of culture at work around the global in the contemporary that anthropologists should find themselves encountering everywhere.
