ABSTRACT
This article reflects on issues arising from attempts to treat behaviour as an object of scientific and social scientific study. It examines what happens when behaviour is taken as a thing, an object of concern, modification and enquiry. At the heart of the notion of behaviour, this article argues, lies a fundamental ambiguity. The concept’s power, but also its elusiveness, lies in its ability to tack back and forth between two visions: on the one hand behaviour as materialized, objectified action, regular, repetitive and rule-bound, and on the other behaviour as a placeholder, a word to index something we do not yet know or understand. Those are two ways of being a ‘thing’.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Matei Candea is a Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Comparison in Anthropology: the Impossible Method (2018) and Corsican Fragments (2010), and the editor of Schools and Styles of Anthropological Theory (2018) and The Social After Gabriel Tarde (2010).
Notes
1 For an engaging collective attempt to think through cross-cutting research across species and disciplines which dovetails with some of the themes evoked in this paper, see Strum and Fedigan (Citation2000).
2 While Ardener pits the sciences against social anthropology, it is worth noting, that many social anthropologists, such as Raymond Firth or Siegfried Nadel had unproblematically adopted behaviour as a term of the art.
3 Ardener's analysis also speaks to a different genealogy in the humanities – that which is concerned with the inherently meaningful nature of human action. This is a point to which I return below.
4 There is an – intentional – paradox in my formulation, of course. Philosophical attempts to refute the distinction between intentional and habitual action are still themselves usually performed as a genre of intentional intervention into habitual ways of thinking.
5 Of course, this doesn’t resolve the Durkheim case. As Desrosieres noted (Citation1998), there is a constitutive uncertainty running through Durkheim’s work concerning this question of the ‘thingness’ of the social. Is it truly a mental attitude in the observer, or is there something substantial to it? This oscillation recalls that between behaviour1 and behaviour2 above.
6 which is of course not in any sense the special property of so-called EuroAmericans (González Citation2001; Graeber Citation2015, 21).