For an anthropology and archaeology of freedom

Abstract

�Freedom� has been characterised as a �weird, Western concept� of little relevance to a broader understanding of human societies. Accordingly, it is sometimes suggested that anthropology, and its sister discipline of archaeology, have had little to say about freedom. Drawing on a collaboration with the late David Graeber, and reflections on the anthropology of A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, I will argue to the contrary that an ethnography of freedom � with its main locus in the colonial milieu of 17th-century North America � lies close to the disciplinary foundations of anthropology, and also has something to say about the modern development of our supposedly weird, supposedly Western concept.