Social anthropology and comparative epistemology.
Corsica,
meerkats,
hospitality,
science,
comparison,
free speech...
**New Book** Reason, Carnival and Honour: an Anthropology of Free Speech
I am a professor of social anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
My research focuses on the nature, materiality, and politics of knowledge, and the sociality, ethics and aesthetics knowledge affords.
I have studied biologists, judges, and schoolteachers at work in France, the UK, and South Africa, the ways in which interpersonal and more-than-human knowledge shapes identity in the rural Mediterranean, anthropological epistemology and methodology, with a particular focus on comparison.
My latest book brings a comparative anthropological perspective on debates over freedom of speech.
My doctoral research on the French Island of Corsica focused on the way in which knowing or refusing to know people, places and language shapes nationalist politics, liberal institutions and exclusion in Corsica. this was the subject of my first monograph, Corsican Fragments . Along the way, I wrote about the ways in which anthropologists and their interlocutors define what counts as politics, and helped relaunch the anthropological study of hospitality - an old Mediterraneanist concern reinvented for the 21st century.
The question of how humans know and relate to places, landscapes and the more-than-human world was an important strand of this early work. In my second project, I followed this question into an ethnography of how scientists endeavour to understand the behaviour of non-human animals.
I published a range of articles based on this research which engaged critically with the rise of multispecies ethnography, and combined an interest in the material semiotics of scientific knowledge with a concern for objectivity and detachment as epistemic virtues.
From 2015 to 2022, I returned to France to study the ways in which a high-profile Parisian courtroom focusing on press law manages what people can know and say about each other. This research formed part of a 6 year ERC-funded research project on the comparative study of freedom of speech.
A number of publications have already emerged from this research, including a bilingual edited special issue on censorship in the French journal Terrain, and a major co-edited volume entitled Freedoms of Speech with Toronto University Press. I have also a book on the anthropology of freedom of speech for Penguin, entitled Reason, Carnival and Honour: An Anthropology of Free Speech.
My current research focuses on a community of users dedicated to one of the oldest continually maintained pieces of free software, the text editor emacs. I am particularly interested in the survival and reinvention of a deeply DIY aesthetic and ethical form in the age of AI and vibe coding.
In parallel to these projects on knowledge in its various forms, I have kept up a thread of research and writing on the epistemology of anthropology and social science itself. From the productive limitations of ethnographic fieldwork, through the history of anthropology and social theory including the work of Gabriel Tarde, to rethinking the nature of anthropological explanation and the heuristics of anthropological comparison. Most recently, this work has coalesced into a consideration of questions of form and formalism and their return to the forefront of anthropological theory and practice.
Candea, M., 2026 Reason, Carnival and Honour: an Anthropology of Free Speech, London: Penguin
Candea M. 2025. A return to form. Social Analysis. 69(1)
Albris, Kristoffer, Matei Candea, Thyge Enggaard, Terne Sasha Thorn Jakobsen, and Morten Axel Pedersen 2025 Measuring MAN (Incorporating JRAI): Computational Anthropological Analysis and Quantitative Speculation. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
Candea, M. (2025) ‘French Law, Danish Cartoons, and the Anthropology of Free Speech’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 67(1) pp. 1–28.
Candea, M., P. Heywood, T. Fedirko & F. Wright n.d. (eds) 2025 Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological perspectives on language, ethics and power. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
