Anastasia Piliavsky (King's College London) & Aaron Ansell (Virginia Tech) are launching a collaborative inquiry into censorship in and of anthropology. We are looking for colleagues who believe that censorship is a problem in and for anthropology to contribute to an edited volume and a series of podcasts. If you're interested, or simply want to be in touch about this problem, please fill out the form below. We are happy to hear from colleagues from all four subfields: biological, sociocultural, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology.

Anthropology is a demanding discipline: it insists that to understand others, we must suspend our own judgment. Its strength lies in a hard-earned openness: a willingness to sit with contradiction, inhabit uncomfortable positions, and follow evidence wherever it leads. This intellectual courage, irreverence, and freedom—the heart of what we do—have grown increasingly vulnerable to all kinds of unfreedom.
Today, the censoring impulse comes from many quarters: campus moralism, federal scrutiny of museums and universities, the gatekeeping of editors and peer reviewers, approval boards, professional provocateurs, grant panels, students with hidden cameras, college administrators, donors, and politicians alike. Whatever its source, the effect hollows out the discipline’s very reason for being.
This project aims to understand censorship in anthropology—to document it, analyze it, and open it to collective reflection. It will also examine how institutional ethics procedures themselves have become a site 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, absolute truth, but simply 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? To what anthropology do we then appeal? And what makes some propositions unsayable?
What is at stake in the suppression of ethnographic truths? Through what speech acts—callouts, smear campaigns, protective advice, employer threats, obfuscation—do our colleagues, students, commentators, administrators, and governments enforce silence? Should there be discursive boundaries to anthropological inquiry—a disciplinary Overton Window—and if so, what philosophical premises justify them? 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 also 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.
We want to hear from colleagues across the four subfields: biological, sociocultural, archaeological, and linguistic anthropology.
We will produce:
1. An edited volume of analytical essays reflecting on experiences ofcensorship, using anonymized examples of review processes, correspondence, oradministrative intervention; and
2. A podcast series in which these conversations will continue in public.
Our aim is not to expose journals, publishers or individuals, but to map a system. We ask contributors to maintain anonymity in their references to colleagues (peer reviewers, journals, editors, administrators) andjournals. (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)