(Freedoms, all of them)

I’ll stop with this one, I promise. But it is in some ways where I should begin. That freedom is an interesting problematic obviously has little to do with whether or not anthropologists can wield it as a concept (that’s just me deferring to the putative audience here). Rather it is a simple empirical fact that freedom–both as slogan and as a thing–is relentlessly present in global society–and especially in the domains of high tech science and engineering. The ideological use of the slogan to brand just about anything is (should be) fair game for many different scholars of contemporary discourse (see e.g. Wendy Chun’s work). But as a starting point, consider only the image to the right, which collects 9 pages of logos that use “freedom” to sell something.

These uses come from both the left and the right, and they have a certain visual consistency to them: images of upheld arms, liberated birds, broken chains are nearly ubiquitous. When a logo emphasizes a flag, a gun or an eagle it is more obviously right-leaning, when it uses a sans-serif font, the color green, or a raised fist, it is more likely a left-leaning cause. Revealingly, the same experiment with the word “liberty” is much more uniform in the use of red, white and blue, the statue of liberty (especially her spiky hat… what is that called anyways?) and only occasionally a broken bell. This analysis could all be done much more expertly, I’m certain, though it hasn’t really been. (Though I can’t resist mentioning a smorgasbord of a book by Svetlana Boym which is obliquely engaged in such a project of cultural and visual analysis).

But what such an analysis tells us is that freedom has a particular ideological role in the process of our collective deliberations and arguments in the global media-scape. In it’s most cynical version, the talk of freedom is simply a particularly effective mask for other interests. I am quite positive that linguistic anthropologists could capably explore the uses of sloganry like this, should they want to, and perhaps even expose something interesting about the reliance on the term; or explain how it differs from others like justice (scales anyone?) equality (rainbows and equal signs?) or sustainability (green, green, green and circular).

However, this sloganry, I submit, is not the only thing–or the most important thing–happening when people speak about freedom. There are also a very wide range of attempts to make freedom occur in the world. This is not about the word or its discursive use, fascinating though it be, but about the practices, technologies, organizations and events created in order to bring freedom into existence–to make freedom doable. I submit that many people in the world who use the word freedom both believe in it as a concept and are frustrated by its jingoistic use, and so are interested in finding ways to make it real and pursuable as a problem.

Which is to say, they are all asking, just as anthropologists might, “what exactly do you mean by freedom?”

Many such people may not even use the word freedom, probably for exactly this reason, even though they remain concerned with the problems of justice, agency, non-interference, non-domination, arbitrary power, causality and responsibility or other components of the concept of freedom. But many groups do earnestly label their efforts this way: Free Software, the Freedom Box, the Freedom Fone, Freedom to Tinker, Freedom to Read, Freedom to Connect, Free Speech TV, Free Culture, Freedom to Marry; and that’s just the tip of a large frosty beverage.

All of these things are specific projects or goals (unlike ‘free trade’ or ‘free markets’ which have somehow gone on beyond meaning anything at all). Some of these things, like the Freedom to Marry campaign(s) are straightforwardly activist and focused on specific policy issues. “Freedom to Marry” is strictly equivalent to “Right to Marry” and so involves the expansion of precise legal rights in specific jurisdictions. Something like “Free Speech TV” is focused on bringing freedom into existence (in the what seems like a roundabout way, really) by “inspir[ing] viewers to become civically engaged to build a more just, equitable, and sustainable society.”

But several things of this sort (most obviously “Free Software”) are in fact specific attempts to create freedom in non-policy senses. They are not (principally) about changing laws, or engaging in deliberation or activism towards the changing of laws, but about creating technologies, organizations, tools or infrastructures that the creators both intend and believe will result in freedom. The Freedom Box, for instance is a relatively recent project to create an alternative to “cloud computing”–it is inspired by Eben Moglen (early co-director of the Free Software Foundation) and his 2010 talk on “Freedom in the Cloud” at the, wait for it, Software Freedom Law Center. The goals of the project are more likely to be concerned less with freedom and more with privacy, anonymity, security and individual control–but it is nonetheless called the Freedom Box, not the Privacy Box or the Individual Control Box, which admittedly ring kind of hollow as names.

Now, at some level the people involved in these projects are engaged in exactly the kind of ethical cultivation that Foucault and Faubion articulate (See part 4)–but with freedom as the telos of that practice as well as its ground. Free Software advocates are famously devoted to a kind of acetic practice of purifying their own software environment; it has its mystics (Donald Knuth), it’s mendicants (Richard Stallman) and its dojo (The command line of the GNU/Linux Operating system). They possess the freedom necessary to engage in these practices by virtue of being either independently wealthy, academics, or well-paid during the day. But as I say, freedom is also the telos of this practice as well as its ground, and that has particular implications which are diagnostic not just of free software, but of contemporary scientific and engineering practice generally.

As an aside, these ethical subjects can be distinguished from other geeks in precisely this respect: it is possible to become a “geeky” ethical subject whose telos is not freedom, but some other goal: entertainment, economic efficiency, mastery of technology, “community” etc. And it is also possible to NOT have the freedom to become an ethical subject in this sense. And perhaps it goes without saying, but it is also possible to have freedom as a telos without at all being concerned with technology, software, science etc.

With freedom as a telos, the problem becomes not just how to behave towards oneself and others, but enabling others to have the freedom these ethical subjects seek to cultivate in themselves. At the very heart of Free Software, for instance, is the suspicion that software tools are necessary to life–for expression, creation, communication and at some level, for ethical cultivation–and that it therefore matters how they are constructed because it will affect the ability of other people to achieve freedom (or to achieve an ethics based on the freedom these tools enable in them). I think this sounds absurd to many people because it gives software too much credit–it makes it out to be the essence of life rather than a simple adjunct. But it does not sound at all absurd to really serious makes of software or devices.

Two things follow from the effort to enable other people’s freedom through the creation of software: 1) this perhaps takes the activity out of the domain of ethical cultivation and into the domain of politics (in the sense Arendt gives it), the domain of work and making, with the implication that it becomes an eminently public activity rather than a private or subjective one; and 2) it invokes exactly that concern which first Mill and then Isaiah Berlin identified: any version of freedom that forces other people to adopt a particular practice–even in the name of freedom–is not worthy of the name. Freedom is freedom from (negative freedom), not a substantive form of life imposed on others in order to make them free (positive freedom). Many who despise the most “ideological” Free Software advocates (or Free Culture, or “Freedom to Marry” people) do so on exactly the latter count: you can’t force me to be free.

But, people who create Free Software or Free Culture are not doing it sui generis; they are not attempting to impose a form of freedom they have invented, or somehow, in some ideal sense, believe exists and can only be accessed through their creations. Rather they are responding to a context in which they perceive the status quo to be one of domination.

Return for a moment to the “ideological” slogans of freedom. The de facto mode of marketing almost all new technologies is to emphasize how they will liberate us, free us from drudgery, create new possibilities for action we had never imagined, etc. (iPad 3 will make you free! Internet Freedom will topple regimes!). It is a very common intuition that what they actually do is “enslave” us, and in more than one way. First by subjecting us to a form of life, a mode of interacting with devices and other people that we had no role in cultivating and second, they dominate us in the very freedom-specific sense of creating a form of arbitrary power to which we must submit if we wish to use them. The former of these is the more ambivalent: sometimes we do want other people to invent new forms of life and to offer us the chance to adopt them. Sometimes, these technologies do enable forms of life that were impossible without them. Good/bad design, good/bad architecture, good/bad city planning all participate in a similar ambivalence. We love this city so we submit to the traffic problem; or we love this building because it enables certain forms of life so we submit to the fact that it is has bad ventilation, and so on. But it is the second of these implications to which much of the high-tech talk of “freedom” in free software, free culture, freedom in the cloud, responds today: non-domination.

Free Software is a practice of making that responds to the fact that most, if not all, new technologies are provided by corporations who possess a form of arbitrary power over their users. It is not a question of active interference by these corporations (except when it is)–active invasion of privacy or even passive surveillance (except when it is). Rather it is the fact that these entities’ power is arbitrary which angers and motivates these actors.

This is where being careful about the meaning of freedom is helpful. For those who would define freedom strictly as noninterference (strong “negative liberty” in Berlin’s sense) in the context of technological infrastructures, the paradox of the “contented slave” confronts them. It is eminently possible that we could live happily with Apple, Google, Facebook and a handful of other mega-corporations who promise not to do evil; it is possible to never experience either harm or interference from them–but we will still be subject to their arbitrary power, which is to say, they reserve the right to interfere when it serves their interests, not ours. For those who would define freedom as non-domination, then this is most certainly an unfree state of affairs.

There is an unease here, primarily for philosophers, I think, because they tend to associate power strictly with the State, and not with corporations, who are more likely to be seen as actors vis-a-vis the State. But they can be both (dominating citizens and dominated by the State; or in some cases, pace rupert murdoch, dominating both citizens and the State), and we really have no theory of freedom to adequately account for this complex relation.

So this is all a roundabout way of explaining that the kind of freedom that concerns those in the high-tech world, and especially in Free Software circles, is of the civic republican kind. It could, if people were better at using this language, answer the kinds of insipid concerns usually trotted out around privacy, security or surveillance, as in “Why should I worry if I’ve done nothing wrong” or the increasingly elaborate privacy controls of Facebook or “circles” of Google+ (by the way, is that circle as in “vicious” or circle as in “of hell”?). The notion of freedom as non-domination is about whether or not there is arbitrary power over your privacy, your security or your surveillance–not about your actions or your fine-grained ability to control who sees what about you. Though it does not account for anyone who desires to be dominated because it “makes my life easier”–that I have no explanation for yet.

If freedom is defined as non-domination then, a different more interesting problem confronts us: how do you make power non-arbitrary? From the perspective of political theory, non-arbitrary power is familiar, if not easy to achieve: it’s the rule of law, it’s democratic accountability, it’s the balance of power, it’s the public sphere as a check on power. But is this also how we make a corporate power non-arbitrary? What about a technology?

Free Software is a very particular (techno-legal) way of attempting to make power non-arbitrary. It is about designing and creating legally protected objects whose technical detail and structure is visible (open source) and whose legal existence is communal (Free Software license), and which commons is implicitly managed by organizations devoted to maintaining this form of freedom (formal enterprises whose goal is the collective maintenance of free software). That is not the only way to create non-arbitrary power, perhaps not even the best way. But that is it’s goal. It does this within the context of State power, but it achieves it through privately ordered groups of people who seek to bring freedom into existence this way.

My point, at least for the anthropologists, if not the philosophers, is that this is an example of how freedom is made doable in a concrete, empirically specifiable way. As far as I know, none of the Free Software advocates, nor any of the lawyers who observe it, talk about freedom in this philosophically precise way (with the possible exception of Lewis Hyde’s recent book). So it is not the case that the philosophical concept of freedom somehow determines or descends into the empirical realm to order the actions of people. Rather, there is an intuition, a context, perhaps a mode of ethical cultivation, which is attempting to achieve results that can be accurately understood with this set of philosophical distinctions. It is in this manner that freedom can be understood as a problem in the world, and anthropological inquiry as a form of empirical philosophy.

And that is all I got.

I, of course, prefer the anthropology of morels.

But that being said, there are in fact a lot of other “Anthropologies of…” which border very closely on anthropology of freedom, and I want to dwell (at too much length) on one of them here: the anthropology of ethics. There is another one going by the label of an “Anthropology of the Will” which will have to wait until whoever has the book checked out returns it to the library, cause there is no way I will pay $55 for it, thank you very much Stanford University Press. There is also the “Anthropology of Happiness” which insofar as freedom is a means rather than an end might be something anthropologists do study. I’m much too pessimistic for that.

But the anthropology of ethics has finally arrived. This year has seen the publication of two books: Ordinary Ethics, (a semi-reasonable $30, $21.99 on Amazon) ed. by Michael Lambeck, and James Faubion’s An Anthropology of Ethics (ditto). The former is a great collection of essays that includes both anthropologists and philosophers (and includes one from Faubion), the latter is likely to appeal to me, Rex, and like 5 other people, which says nothing about how awesome it is, but rather, indicates a perhaps perverse pleasure in being inside James Faubion’s brain. Nonetheless, both of them lay out some problems and concepts for an anthropology of ethics in rigorous and satisfying ways.

It should be said that the “anthropology of ethics” referenced here probably means many things to many people: the parochial problem of our own ethics in anthropology, the newer problem of the bureaucratization of virtue, which we have dwelled on here and which includes the handful of people studying Institutional Review Boards (Rena Lederman, Annelise Riles, Charles Bosk, etc), the rise of an ethics industry, esp. bioethics, and so forth. But Lambek, Faubion and crew sustain an interest in ethics by asking to what extent ethics is a problem for empirical investigation by anthropologists. Is it a “field” of investigation, a method, a universal feature of human life, etc?

Clearly, they are not alone in this, since the 2000s might fairly be characterized as the decade of evolutionary psychology, wherein the
putative discovery of the “moral organ” (which is apparently shaped like a trolley, and is responsible for the rise and fall of reputations of Harvard professors) has occured and led to hundreds if not thousands of studies identifying “morality” as a universal biological feature of animals. And let me just point out that, ipso facto, there is no actual debate here because a) the kinds of actions and effects we call moral or ethical can be biological without being the same everywhere and b) evolutionary psychologists are rarely interested in defining morality or ethics as such, and more interested in looking for effects that might lead to a theory of what those things are. If there is a debate, it is probably at the level of the efficacy of the discursive, i.e. to what extent is the phenomena of an ethical action inextricably a problem of its circulation in discourse? Experimental social scientists will reduce this to a problem of experimental design, interpretive social scientists will not let it go.

But I digress. There have been calls for an anthropology of ethics and/or morality (and I more or less buy the claim made by both Faubion and Lambek, that it is not a good idea to insist that there is a distinction between the two). In a “debate” in Anthropological Theory in 2008, Didier Fassin and Wiktor Stoczkowski briefly addressed the issue. The debate exemplifies the problem of the anthropology of ethics, viz. is it about an anthropology of morals (or ethics) as a particular real object of study in the world, or is it about the morality or ethics (or by implication, objectivity or political commitment) of the anthropologist. The latter reflects what I referred to in a previous post as political anthropology’s distaste for the concept of freedom: it is a normative commitment, not a thing in the world capable of being studied. Anthropologists (should, some say without irony) shy away from normative terms, especially those that seem to be “western” in origin. (I say ‘seem to be’ because that attribution [e.g. "Freedom is a western notion"] entails both an empirical claim which is not necessarily justified, and a morality in which the concept is both original to “us” and therefore either good or bad, depending on who’s talking.)

But both Lambek’s and Faubion’s book are arguing for the former: that ethics is an empirical field, not just a problem of research orientation. Lambek in particular is keen to make ethics a feature of action generally, and not just one of those “anthropologies of…” domains like politics, art, religion etc. One is not ethical only when in church or when helping the poor, one is ethical at least as regularly as one’s mind is in one’s body. Action has an ethical quality. To the extent that we are comfortable with the claim that all people act, we should be comfortable with the claim that all people act in an ethically specific manner (which is different than the colloquially distorted meaning of “he acted ethically” which is an attribution of having done good).

Faubion, perhaps predictably, is eager to elaborate an anthropology of ethics based in Foucault’s work, and especially that of the last years of his life when problems of askesis, parrhesia, and self-fashioning came to dominate his research. For both Faubion and Lambek (and his contributors) there is a relatively sharp distinction drawn between a Kantian form of ethics, and a Foucaultian one (for the record, Lambek has placed his bets on a return to Aristotle’s understanding of ethics, action and judgement, which he elaborates in the first chapter of the volume, whereas Faubion’s unlikely dark horse is Niklas Luhmann).

Ethics in Kant’s sense is (often caricatured as) the setting of a categorical imperative (a law) by which one must act. Thus Kantian ethics reduces ethics to a problem of reason, which in practical terms creates rules that must be followed (obligations) rather than a series of judgements strongly conditioned by or even determined by, circumstances. This “rule-following” ethics allows for a subject who approaches action as driven by (and subordinate to) his/her own priniciple (arrived at by virtue of reason). (And then there is the Weberian elaboration on this, which I won’t go into here). Freedom, therefore, is the ability to act in accordance with these principles.

Ethical practice in Foucault’s sense is much different. It is frequently laid out (as it is in these two texts) as consisting of four components 1) the part of oneself that is the object of an ethics (sex, religion, work etc); 2) the mode of subjection (reason, divine law, natural law, biology); 3) the substance or means of ethical self-fashioning; and 4) the goal or telos of ethical self-fashioning. Considered according to this schema, the Foucaultian definition of ethics allows us to make sense of how individuals submit to things that seem to be the opposite of freedom (Laidlaw’s examples of Jain ascetisism, Mahmood’s pietist cults in Egypt, etc.). Insofar as the choice is available to them to pursue this kind of ethical self-fashioning, they are engaging in what Foucault called “ethics as the practice of freedom.”

So given this sketchy outline, one might ask: is the problems of Freedom a subset of the problem of ethics, or a separate but related one? Can one have an anthropology of ethics without the concept of freedom? And if not, is freedom something to be explored concurrently with ethics, or is it something that requires a more careful separation and analysis. Under the Kantian version, freedom is more or less straightforwardly about non-interference, and in particular, non- interference with the ethical rules arrived at by way of reason–the categorical imperative. Under the Foucaultian version, the question arises of whether freedom is means or end or both. At some level the freedom to self-fashion is separate from an ethical life oriented towards living freely or achieving freedom. Whether there is freedom to self-fashion takes freedom out of the domain of the ethical, but treating it as a telos, leaves it within the domain of ethics.

It is at this point that I think the work done by philosophers to specify the problem of freedom is actually helpful. So consider how
the political philosopher Philp Pettit approaches the problem. In philosophy, the problem of freedom is divided up into separate problems: the individual, psychological problem of free will vs. determinism
(so-called compatibilism debates) and the political problem of liberty. Pettit argues for reintegrating them both because they were origincally integrated as problems from Hobbes through Kant and because a solution to both problems is more compelling than a solution to either one separately (this is implicitly an indictment of philosophy’s previous work of distinguishing them as different kinds of problems, but he doesn’t say that).

Pettit’s reasoning is that there is a compelling solution to both and it comes from the tradition of “civic republicanism” that has seen much revival as of late. One way in which this tradition is useful is that it mediates between the negative and positive versions of liberty. Republican theorists are disatisfied with the notion that non-interference (negative liberty) is sufficient because it leads to the problem of the contented slave (e.g. a slave who is well provided for and whose master does not interfere in anything that s/he wants tod). Clearly the problem of being a slave, even a happy one is intuitively anathema to most any notion of freedom. But republican theorists are also suspicious of any positive freedom that forces people to do what is right (i.e. you must live this way because it enhances your freedom). The solution is what they call non-domination, which is defined as not being subject to arbitrary power. Freedom for republican theorists requires both non-interference and a kind of structural or institutional relationship which is not arbitrary (i.e. always potentially capable of restricting freedom).

I’m not a philosopher (nor apparently am I an anthropologist, but whatever), so I can’t say whether Kant’s version of things can deal with these problems. At the level of the individual, the categorical imperative does seem to be strictly about the assertion of individual powers, and makes no reference to the structural, institutional or background context of that power. But in the Foucaultian case, there are two different kinds of freedom at stake: the first the ability to self-fashion: to engage in practices of self-fashioning (asceticism, for instance; or good samaritanism) guided by a mode of subjection (reason, the divine law, psychadelic experience etc) oriented towards a goal without interference either directly or as a result of some system of domination. The second however is to make freedom (whether as non-interference or non-domination) into a goal, and here it seems to me to matter what kind of freedom one chooses. If one is going to fashion onself as a freedom-fighter, for instance, the goal of freedom as radical non-interference (the libertarian) implies different practices than does the goal of freedom as non-domination (civic republicanism). This of course, implies “the freedom to fight for freedom” or the “freedom to make onself free” which only sounds paradoxical, but is not in fact. And it’s also why, I think, James Faubion’s case for an anthropology of ethics appeals to “auto-poietic”
systems in a Luhmannian sense. But that is neither here nor there. Or it’s way beyond there.

In any case, if there is a point to this post for anyone who hasn’t rightfully given up by now, it is that freedom as a concept that incorporates both the individual problematic of action, and the political problem of domination seems to be to be uniquely related to the kinds of “structure and agency” problems that anthropologists are interested in, but are loath to investigate under this label… for reasons already enumerated. If there is a programmatic aspect to my thinking here, then it is that the exploration of the theoretical variations in he concept of freedom can illuminate and help explain the kinds of actions people undertake not just when they are being ethical, but when they take the possibility of ethical action under consideration as a goal in itself.

“The time is now ripe for anthropologists to consider the concept of freedom and the empirical manifestations of freedom in culture. What more significant and urgent task is there for the anthropologist than that of launching a concerted inquiry into the nature of freedom and its place and basis in nature and the cultural process? Such an inquiry would provide in time a charter for belief in those values and principles indispensable to the process of advancing culture and to the ideal of a democratic world order dedicated to the development of human potentialities to their maximum perfection.” (preface to The Concept of Freedom in Anthropology ed. David Bidney, 1963 p. 6)

You and me both, pal.

Thus did David Bidney valiantly launch the investigation into freedom by anthropologists only to immediately then admit: “I realize that hard-headed, realistic anthropologists, including some of the participants in this symposium, would not find themselves in agreement with this anthropologic dream. There is danger, they will protest, that you are reifying Freedom into an absolute entity, just as culture once was. Freedom they will object is a non-scientific, political slogan which betrays its ethnocentric, Western and American origin…”

Freedom, as concept, still evokes this suspicion. That it is “nothing more” than a political slogan; or that it masks the reality of domination, oppression, slavery and power. As well it should given how promiscuously it is exploited.Or, as Edmund Leach so characteristically puts it in his contribution to the same volume: “To prate of Freedom as if it were a separable virtue is the luxurious pursuit of aristocrats and of the more comfortable members of modern affluent society. It has been so since the beginning.” (77)

What Leach expresses here, in part, is the descriptivist bias of anthropology of the time, and specifically of political anthropology: that the goal is comparative analysis without a priori reference to any normative political ideals. This, I think probably resonates with most anthropologists, who would be much less likely to be interested in Freedom as a concept that delimits a certain relationship between action and governance, more more likely to see it as a slogan that has been used as a warrant in colonial, imperial and global economic endeavors; as a tool used to transform existing arrangements in its own name (and secretly in the interests of a global elite). At a first cut this is undeniably so if one simply listens to the way the word is used in the news, and by politicians especially.

Indeed, it is my probably hasty opinion that the whole of “political anthropology” (at least in it’s 1930s-1970s form) shares this bias, despite the fact that it would seem to be this domain to which one would immediately turn for help in understanding the variations in the nature of Freedom. Instead, freedom is excluded from investigation insofar as it contaminates, confuses or otherwise confounds the exploration of objective political structures. Georges Balandier’s account of the development of political anthropology up to the mid 1960s (Political Anthropology) clearly shows how the questions of state formation, legitimacy and domination, kinship and power, status and power and so forth have been investigated. But he never mentions the word freedom. This is not so curious if freedom is understood as an outcome of a normative theory of the state, in favor of a descriptive, comparative science of political systems. Come to think of it, Weber never really talks about freedom either, and for similar reasons: the goal of a scientific sociology is not to articulate the ought of political systems but the is. It does not appear as a subject in Leach’s Political Systems of Highland Burma, nor in Meyer Fortes and EE Evans-Pritchard’s collection on African Political Systems.

What Bidney was proposing therefore, probably looked far too universalist in its appeal (as if Freedom were inevitably to be found in the struggles of people everywhere) and worse, potentially dangerous (insofar as it imposes a normative vision of freedom on those it seeks to understand). The properly anthropological way to think about “an anthropology of freedom”, therefore, would be to look at it from the perspective of the rest of the world and how it perceives the imposition of “freedom” on it.

There are probably a lot of attempts to do something like this. As I mentioned in a previous post, few of them tag these attempts explicitly with the word ‘freedom’–for whatever reasons. Two in particular that might be explored for this are Paul Reisman’s Freedom Among the Fulani and the great short piece by Caroline Humphrey, “Alternative Freedoms” (thanks again Morpheus!). Neither of these expresses allegiance to or appears similar to what we think of as “political anthropology.” Riesman, interestingly, was a student of Balandier (and the son of David Riesman of The Lonely Crowd fame), but he explicitly avers any deep engagement with political anthropology in his book, which is dedicated instead to Dorothy Lee.

Humphrey’s short piece does more or less does exactly what I was claiming no one in anthropology was doing. In it she outlines three concepts of freedom, starting from the closest linguistic analogues in play, in order to show why it might be that Russians today, hearing a speech of Bush or Blair of Obama crowing triumphantly about freedom, might view such promises with suspicion or fear. At the end of the article she puts it bluntly: “The three ideas of freedom have come to inhabit very different worlds of value. None of them is identical with Western ideas of freedom. But after all, Russians are far from alone in this. Much of the world is culturally different in this regard.” (9) [1]

The first idea is Svoboda, which contains elements of a version of freedom as access to a privileged sphere, a bit like Arendt’s account of the ancient Greeks and their distinction between a sphere of privation and slavery (the household) and a sphere of freedom and publicness, the polis. According to Humphrey, the root is svoi, (self, ours) and so shares some of the meaning of “our way of life” and leads to a particular sense of freedom as “our kind of freedom”–not universalist at all. Thus a hearer in Russian might not hear the word “freedom,” translated as svoboda, as a universal value. The second use is the peculiar Mir (like the spacecraft) which means universe, humanity, the world, but also, ‘peace’ (after the Soviet linguistic reforms). Mir has aspects of a “will of the people” sort–a “universalized community” and Humphrey says of her explanation “I hope this helps explain the deeply non-intuitive fact (to us) that there are Russian villagers today who identify freedom, precisely with Stalinism.” Finally there is Volya, which carries a meaning similar to “will” and expresses that aspect of freedom which is associated with volition and intention.

That there are three words for freedom is nothing new (English boasts Freedom and Liberty), and that the words have a variable semantic range is also unsurprising. Nonetheless, Humphrey is demonstrating how the concept looks different not only linguistically, but in terms of history and political structure. There is an extensive discussion about the tension produced by the transition to capitalism, and the ways in which freedom comes to be associated with lawlessness, banditry and the unconstrained exploitation of Russian resources by a few elites. But this is, in some ways, the same debate about liberty that has occupied political theory since at least the French, if not the English revolution. Liberty is always in tension with some other notion such as stability, tradition, security, etc.

Paul Riesman’s book is a different take on the problem of freedom or liberty. The book is probably better remembered for its experimental character. It is divided into two sections, the first of which cleaves very closely to a classic monographic form detailing aspects of Fulani life; the second is, arguably, one of the earliest experiments in “reflexive” ethnography in which “life as lived” and the encounter of Riesman with Fulani social life is organized through his own experience of coming to an understanding.

Because Riesman is avowedly uninterested in the political structure of Fulani society, the notion of Freedom he is interested in probably ends up looking much more like a question of “agency” (a term he does not use, though Paul Stoller and Lila Abu-Lughod count among his acolytes) than freedom in the political sense. In the first part, he attends at length to the problem of the terms Pulaaku and Semteende–words that circumscribe the experience of custom, obligation, honors, shame and sanction. In this sense, the kind of freedom Riesman is concerned with is in fact the relationship of structure and agency more than anything else. In the second part, Riesman explores more theological notions of freedom (Man’s freedom and Allah’s power) and the notion of freedom as “self-mastery,” which corresponds in a loose way to some of the questions often lumped under “autonomy” (and which has the delightful literal meaning of “He who possesses his own head” [226]). Riesman spends a good deal of the last part talking about how children come to be autonomous or free, a subject that clearly obsessed him, since his second book published posthumously (First find your child a good mother) is concerned with disproving the psychological and psychoanalytic claims that certain kinds of child-rearing practices affect the outcome of adult personhood.

Both Riesman and Humphrey are good examples, I think of the confusion that attends the concept of freedom for more than the simple reason that it is an ideological slogan. As a philosophical concept, the term denotes something that is both political (concerning the structure of governance, rights and the relation of people to each other) and psychological (denoting a relationship to will, autonomy or acting). Both accounts show (but in different ways) how the integration of these two aspects might differ in different settings.

None of this settles the question for me of why Freedom is particularly uninteresting to anthropologists, but it has opened up for me a set of related questions (Another Post! I am Unstoppable!) about two recent attempts to address something related to freedom: the anthropology of the will, and the anthropology of ethics. To be continued…