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'.

Disciplinary Cross-currents: Rebounding on the Heuristics of Inquiry

“…The sociological focus should either give up the outdated, quasi-intuitionistic pretence of being a special non-natural domain and become more integrated into the nomothetic sciences—‘naturalised’, as it were, in terms of a scientific psychology, evolutionary history, etc.—or it should turn away from such inappropriate ‘science-aping’ ambitions and try to work with (rather than reduce or replace) our social and moral concepts and the lived character of human experiences. Defenders of the first approach tend to reject the idea of the autonomy of sociology and moral philosophy, as it were, while protagonists of the second approach tend to be sceptical of the idea of social and moral theory (see, for a recent recapitulation, Candea, 2019). Indeed, it sometimes looks as if contemporary sociology is shaping up for a fight along just this line.…”

Knowing Animals: Multispecies Ethnography and the Scope of Anthropology

“…1010As Marilyn Strathern (1992, 12) asserts, “It is anthropological axiom that however discrete they appear to be, entities are the products of relationships.” Also see Candea (2019). …”