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What might a comparative anthropology of freedom of speech look like? The question is slightly disconcerting in part because “freedom of speech” is a concern that is already laden with its own comparative thrust. Before anthropologists have had a chance to place them “in comparative perspective,” liberal1 invocations of and debates over freedom of speech are themselves multiply, pointedly, and normatively comparative. These comparisons, often cast in national or civilizational terms, echo anthropological modes of contextualization, yet deploy them in ways that many anthropologists would find unsatisfactory and uncomfortable…