What is censorship? Is it different from other forms of silencing, and if so how? For some, censorship is a transgression against a speaker imagined as essentially free, and must be denounced, whether it is displayed in plain sight in totalitarian regimes or hiding in the secret folds of Facebook’s algorithms; for others, censorship is an unduly negative name for the inevitable (albeit never innocent) cuts and limitations which define and shape genres and styles of expression, be it academic, artistic or everyday. On this latter view, expression is always entangled with power, and policing the bounds of the sayable is just another field of political struggle – a struggle which takes place on campuses, in courtrooms or online. These are sometimes seen as two fundamentally opposed philosophical, political and epistemic visions: a “modern” or “liberal” vision of censorship, opposed to a “postmodern” or “relativist” one. Yet anthropologists in particular are well placed to see that these are still arguments from a common ground, which draw from a shared stock of Euro-American philosophical and political concepts and controversies. To this discussion, anthropology can provide some useful disturbances by expanding the cast of characters and the range of modalities of silence and expression.