An invitation from Anastasia Piliavsky (King's College London) & Aaron Ansell (Virginia Tech).
We are launching a collaborative inquiry into censorship in and of anthropology. We invite colleagues who believe that censorship is a problem in and for our discipline to contribute to an edited volume and a series of podcasts. If you are interested—or simply wish to stay in touch about this issue—please fill out the form below. We welcome voices from all four subfields: biological, sociocultural, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology.

Anthropology is a demanding discipline: to understand others, we must suspend our own judgment. Its strength lies in a hard-earned openness—a willingness to sit with contradiction, inhabit discomfort, and follow evidence wherever it leads. That intellectual courage, irreverence, and freedom—the very heart of what we do—have grown increasingly vulnerable to new forms of unfreedom.
Today, the censoring impulse comes from many quarters: campus moralism, federal scrutiny of museums and universities, editorial gatekeeping, ethics boards, professional provocateurs, grant panels, students with hidden cameras, administrators, donors, and politicians alike. Whatever its source, the effect is the same: it hollows out the discipline’s reason for being.
This project seeks to understand censorship in anthropology—to document, analyze, and open it to collective reflection. It will also examine how institutional ethics procedures have themselves become sites of censorship: how, in the name of protection, they sometimes curtail inquiry and pre-empt uncomfortable truths.
We begin with a simple, unsettling question: What if it’s true? By this, we do not mean some fixed or absolute truth, but what we as scholars, with our observations to back us, believe to be the case. What if, after the hard grind of ethnography, we arrive at conclusions we believe to be true—but flinch from reporting them? What makes some propositions unsayable? And to what anthropology do we then appeal?
What is at stake in the suppression of ethnographic truths? Through what speech acts—callouts, smear campaigns, protective advice, employer threats, obfuscation—do colleagues, students, commentators, administrators, and governments enforce silence? Should there be discursive boundaries to anthropological inquiry—a disciplinary Overton Window—and if so, on what philosophical grounds? Who decides where they lie, and by what process?
So, what if what you have seen, heard, and understood is accurate, grounded, and important—but unpalatable to prevailing sensibilities? What happens if you say it? What happens if you don’t? For us, for our students, for the discipline, these are not rhetorical questions. They go to the heart of anthropology’s survival as a distinct and valuable way of knowing the world. When the question shifts from “Is this argument sound?” to “Should this be said?” the result is not merely “ethnographic refusal,” as Sherry Ortner once called it, but something deeper: the training of anthropologists not only to write, but to think acceptably—a training out of anthropology itself.
We will produce:
1. An edited volume of essays reflecting on experiences of censorship, using anonymised examples of review processes, correspondence, or administrative intervention; and
2. A podcast series that continues these conversations in public.
Our aim is not to expose journals, publishers, or individuals, but to map a system. We ask contributors to maintain anonymity when referring to colleagues (peer reviewers, editors, administrators, etc.), though public officials are a different matter.
If you are interested in taking part, please fill out the form below and we will be in touch.
Aaron Ansell (Virginia Tech) & Anastasia Piliavsky (King’s College London)