Paolo Heywood
I am an Associate Professor of Social Anthropology at Durham University. Before this I was a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where I took my undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. I work on ethics & morality, Italy and Italian politics, history and memory, and the history and epistemology of anthropological theory.
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Books by Paolo Heywood
As politicians, commentators, and social scientists seek to understand what lies behind new forms of political authoritarianism, and whether and how they resemble movements once thought consigned to the past, Burying Mussolini narrates how people in Predappio cope with the dark heritage of their home by carefully crafting a sense of 'ordinariness' that is itself inflected by ghosts of their fascist past.
By combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings, the essays in Beyond Description offer critical examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation in the world and within anthropology itself.
Genuinely remarkable… There's almost nothing quite this lucidly philosophical, conceptually and politically provocative and deeply ethnographic in recent work… An intellectual treat with few competitors. Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
Papers by Paolo Heywood
Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has extensive tools for bringing free speech into view beyond its quality as an abstract ideal or legal category. This entry borrows theoretical perspectives, as well as ethnographic examples produced by anthropologists, to shed light on free speech within a broader comparative frame. It begins by focusing on free speech as a dynamic value or virtue, asking: what is it about ‘free’ or ‘direct’ speech that people value when they value it? Secondly, the entry casts critical light on the idea of an individual as the universal ‘free speaker’, demonstrating how collective or disaggregated subjects can also practice free speech. Thirdly, it explores the material settings, contexts, or technologies through which free speech is curtailed or realised. Finally, the entry considers the idea of ‘voice’ as signalling modes of embodiment, and auditory phenomena such as noise, sound, and silence, which are not spoken language but can inform and expand our understanding of free speech.
the Vatican to adopt a more progressive position on various issues, including homosexuality,
sought to pursue a dialogue with the city’s LGBTQ community. The relative success of those
conversations depended upon We Are Church persuading their anticlerical interlocutors,
whose antipathy toward the Vatican runs deep, that they were an entirely different entity to
the Catholic “hierarchy.” But in prevailing in this endeavor, they created a further obstacle
for themselves: the more convincingly they distinguished themselves from orthodox
Catholicism, the less convincing was their eponymous declaration of “We Are Church”;
the further they traveled toward the positions held by their LGBTQ activist counterparts,
the more likely they were to be dismissed as unrepresentative of Catholicism, and thus
irrelevant. Thus in this case ethics across borders depends not only upon finding affinities
and sustaining differences but also upon finding affinities over how to sustain differences.
Similarly, I suggest that debates in anthropology surrounding radical difference may benefit
from attending to the ways in which such difference itself can be the subject of agreement
or disagreement.
As politicians, commentators, and social scientists seek to understand what lies behind new forms of political authoritarianism, and whether and how they resemble movements once thought consigned to the past, Burying Mussolini narrates how people in Predappio cope with the dark heritage of their home by carefully crafting a sense of 'ordinariness' that is itself inflected by ghosts of their fascist past.
By combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings, the essays in Beyond Description offer critical examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation in the world and within anthropology itself.
Genuinely remarkable… There's almost nothing quite this lucidly philosophical, conceptually and politically provocative and deeply ethnographic in recent work… An intellectual treat with few competitors. Michael Herzfeld, Harvard University
Free speech is a familiar concept. It is an established ideal of liberalism and democratic politics, and the subject of political debate and conflict across diverse historical and cultural contexts. Free speech has not primarily been considered, however, as a set of lived, valued, and contested practices, mediated by various linguistic, ethical, and material forms. While anthropology has not traditionally occupied itself with free speech, it has extensive tools for bringing free speech into view beyond its quality as an abstract ideal or legal category. This entry borrows theoretical perspectives, as well as ethnographic examples produced by anthropologists, to shed light on free speech within a broader comparative frame. It begins by focusing on free speech as a dynamic value or virtue, asking: what is it about ‘free’ or ‘direct’ speech that people value when they value it? Secondly, the entry casts critical light on the idea of an individual as the universal ‘free speaker’, demonstrating how collective or disaggregated subjects can also practice free speech. Thirdly, it explores the material settings, contexts, or technologies through which free speech is curtailed or realised. Finally, the entry considers the idea of ‘voice’ as signalling modes of embodiment, and auditory phenomena such as noise, sound, and silence, which are not spoken language but can inform and expand our understanding of free speech.
the Vatican to adopt a more progressive position on various issues, including homosexuality,
sought to pursue a dialogue with the city’s LGBTQ community. The relative success of those
conversations depended upon We Are Church persuading their anticlerical interlocutors,
whose antipathy toward the Vatican runs deep, that they were an entirely different entity to
the Catholic “hierarchy.” But in prevailing in this endeavor, they created a further obstacle
for themselves: the more convincingly they distinguished themselves from orthodox
Catholicism, the less convincing was their eponymous declaration of “We Are Church”;
the further they traveled toward the positions held by their LGBTQ activist counterparts,
the more likely they were to be dismissed as unrepresentative of Catholicism, and thus
irrelevant. Thus in this case ethics across borders depends not only upon finding affinities
and sustaining differences but also upon finding affinities over how to sustain differences.
Similarly, I suggest that debates in anthropology surrounding radical difference may benefit
from attending to the ways in which such difference itself can be the subject of agreement
or disagreement.