Behaviour as a thing

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’.

KEYWORDS:

• Behaviour
• biology
• anthropology
• concepts
• epistemology

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 (2000).

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 (1998), 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 2001; Graeber 2015, 21).