A growing concern about academic freedoms has recently resulted in the EASA General Assembly's December 2023 vote on a Motion to Create a Working Group on Human Rights and Academic Freedom, followed in February 2024 by the EASA executive's letter expressing direct concern after Professor Ghassan Hage's working relationship with the Max Planck Institute was terminated after misplaced accusations of racism and antisemitism. It is timely that the current issue opens up a space to discuss ethics, commitment, critique, authorship and truth seeking.

How better to introduce the current issue than with an exploration of ‘suspicion and evidence’ and the various techniques people have developed to discern between truth and untruth in times of uncertainty? Built on an ethnography of Facebook discussion groups devoted to ‘Covid truth’, Mathijs Pelkmans provides a stimulating analysis of academic critique and conspiracy theorising, ‘a deeply social activity’ where conversations ‘highlight the interlinking of uncertainty and certainty’. Central to his demonstration are the works of Rita Felski (2012) and Bruno Latour (2004) on critique as a core dimension in academic work. They both highlight the negative edge of critique in the way that it is characterised by ‘againstness’ and it never stands alone, a feature too often conducive to routinised assertions of always being right for debunking dominant truths and unravelling dominant narratives. Pelkmans’ ethnography challenges us to reconsider some of the uniqueness, if not superiority, of our academic epistemologies in a refreshing a-Bourdieusian way. Indeed, are academic critics set apart from conspiracists as critique is set apart from suspicion, one being an intellectual activity while the other pertains to affects of paranoia? Offering to investigate these ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, quoting Paul Ricoeur (1970), Pelkmans argues that suspicion as practice of demystification differs from critique in the way it transcends doubt by constantly formulating positive hypotheses. The ways by which people come to attribute epistemic value to such ideas is what needs to be explored to actually get a better grasp on what makes our post-truth times.

Academic freedom has always been value laden, but epistemic values are never to be taken for granted. The current challenges it faces certainly gives a renewed critical edge to critique if we are to guard our epistemic practices from suspicion, too often disguised behind moral and ethical statements. To what extent are we what we are writing? To what extent is a research, an analysis of ethnographic data, a piece of critical theory to be endorsed by a single individual designated as the author? As speaking and writing, in academia as well as outside it, are becoming activities one has to account for in multiple ways, the temptation is strong to refrain from it, to distort our endeavours to assert things and take a stance, to choose non-disclosure or even use anonymity as a strategy for protection. Articles by Luther Blissett, Brendan Whitty and James McMurray address this important question from various perspectives and experiences. Blissett proposes reimagining authorship in anthropology, which may bely the complex processes of research; Whitty describes an ethnography in an international agency's office where every ‘delivery’ was closely scrutinised to the point he was forced to embargo his thesis to avoid exposing himself to legal action; McMurray invites us to reflect on the immeasurable ethics of the ethnographic approach and the impossible permanence of consent when the informants are put in danger years after the fieldwork has ended.

Although this editorial is an opportunity to raise questions about academic freedom as the freedom to write without constraint or pressure, the possibility of writing and the way in which we write is more often understood as a form of structural and symbolic violence, as power more than danger. Reflecting on authorship, says Blissett, is always coming back to the question ‘who has the right to write’, and more precisely, who has the right to claim the symbolic prestige of what is written and published. This article builds on EASA's October 2021 ‘Guidelines for managing collaboration between anthropologists’, which deals with groups of unequal researchers and further underlines the importance of interlocutors as well as collectivities as possible co-authors. How to ethically articulate and appraise the collaborative dimension of researching and publishing? This question is addressed in very different ways by Blissett, Whitty and McMurray in this issue, which reflects without extinguishing some of its complexity. We invite our readership to consider them together in this regard. But let us focus here on the discussion about anonymity and pseudonyms that Blissett aptly develops.

If total anonymity can be a way to hide something about the author – gender, social status, position – which extends to ensuring protection of his/her informant, it cannot go to the point of allowing evasion from the legal responsibility of standing for one's words. Whitty walked through a concrete aporia on this practicality when he started writing his dissertation based on an ethnography of ordinary bureaucratic practices in an international donation agency. Anonymising the agency as well as its informants could not be enough for the head of the office with whom Whitty had signed a contract prior to starting the research. The agreement stipulated that the ethnographer would submit everything he would write to the office chief manager. It is the critical dimension inherent in anthropological analysis that was the core of the problem the ethnographer encountered as soon as he began to hand over chapters: in the chief officer's reading, the representation of bureaucratic practice in terms that are not those of bureaucracy would endanger the employees of the agency if ever made public to donors. It was therefore the academic production itself that it became necessary to protect from public scrutiny and Whitty was threatened with legal action if he continued writing. The solution was found through a decision to place the PhD thesis under total embargo, with the consequence of depriving the young scholar of reproducing its work in academia in a traditional way (published books and articles). Sometimes, Whitty concludes, multi-sited ethnographies are the best way to blur fieldwork into actual anonymity, while referring to one site is unescapable disclosure.

McMurray concurs, showing that techniques of anonymisation could be of no avail to protect informants when political conditions change, as he experienced during his fieldwork in Xinjiang among Uyghur populations. In any case, he argues, discretion remains a cornerstone for any guidelines to ethical research in anthropology, built on the ethics of the discipline (its internal good) and adapted to context rather than pre-framed from any external and rather abstract position. Nothing, not even activists’ ethics, should overcome professional ethics in this regard, because only the researcher on the ground should be accountable for the relationship they had, and continue to have in the form of the legacy of consent once given – call it trust – even when the fieldwork context has become dangerous for previous informants.

Publishing pseudonymously, as Blissett is doing in this issue, raises a set of ethical and political concerns around authorship. Far from merely removing something, a pseudonym seems to also add: s/he can play the part in academia with an ORCID and a corpus of publications, although Blissett underlines that this would not be possible for early career scholars applying for jobs. S/he can also stand for a collective and say more than what s/he publishes, as illustrated by the career of Camille Noûs, an allegorical French author created in March 2020, who had already co-signed nearly 200 articles in numerous scientific disciplines a year after his/her first publication. The stated objective for adding Camille Noûs as a co-author has been to denounce current modes of publication, evaluation and recruitment in some kind of demonstrative critique (RogueESR 2021). Drawing from Marilyn Strathern's analysis of Melanesian ‘dividuality’, Blissett suggests that ‘dividual authorship’ captures the fact that validation becomes a part of the value, and invites to start thinking of auths in place of authors to unravel some of what Camille Noûs points at.

Ethics remains central in the discussions developed in the last two articles by Olivier Allard and Michael Scott in this issue, although in a very different way from the considerations internal to the practice of investigation and publication developed in the first set of articles. In these texts, what is at stake is the exploration of the question of responsibility towards others in a more general way: either in what it constructs in value but what it undoes in practice (Allard) or in the form of the perpetual emergence of relational patterns whose contours must be reconceptualised after the ‘posthumanist’ turn (Scott). Although Allard's article, which is developed on an ethnographic account of the Warao Indians in the Amazon and Scott's, which is constructed on a discussion of Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, Michel Serres and Anna Tsing, are utterly dissimilar, they ultimately revolve around a similar intuition: while attentionality is crucial to practices of care, its opposite in the form of negligence (Serres, and after him, Ingold), laziness and stinginess (Warao) is a part of it.

Allard offers to refine our comprehensiveness of care in resorting to ‘perspectival moralism’. Care should not be exclusively considered from the giver's side, and a responsibility to pay attention to while acknowledging needs, but also from the perspective of the one who seeks it. Among Warao, both are matters of performance and the outcomes appear as always uncertain. In this, caring for has a strong structural impact on kinship: care performances are kinning performances – kinship relationships are first and foremost affective memories of ‘who gave me food when I was hungry’. Negligence to perform is then another name for de-kinning, as the potential overgrowth of relations comes with a necessity to sever some and nurture others.

Building on Serres’ notion of ‘diligent religion’, Scott proposes giving the posthuman religion delineated by Ingold and Latour its own name. The ‘religence’ he is calling for would keep its meaning as relegere and religare, giving the possibility to knot and unknot ties, heed potential links or leave them unnoticed as mere potentialities, an ever-ongoing composite of religion and negligence. Let us quote at length Scott, with a purpose and suggestion that his call for religence could engage us as anthropologists and as academics when it comes to dealing with our colleagues:

[Religence] is the activity of giving others their due, of sensing with awe and hesitation the presence of others, of reading and re-reading others, of testing the limits of infringement and triggering backlashes, of making and maintaining alliances, of setting and submitting to religio, of transgressing and making reparations, of eliciting and repelling, of respecting, responding to and reverencing others, even when compelled to disrupt or halt their continuity in the interest of one's own.

Isabelle Rivoal

Dimitra Kofti