Matei Candea

The Politics of Victimhood

Politics: The science and art of government; the science dealing with the form, organization, and administration of a state or part of one, and with the regulation of its relations with other state...

Our Division of the Universe Making a Space for the Non-Political in the Anthropology of Politics

Anthropology’s extremely successful efforts to expand the category of “the political” has left anthropologists with a reticence when it comes to the definition of the political itself. The political is left intentionally open-ended so as to enable critical engagement with an increasing range of topics, but this often entails an abandonment of the political as an ethnographic category. What, for instance, are we to make of claims by bilingual schoolteachers in Corsica that “education” and “politics” should—in some instances at least—be kept separate? This article starts from an ethnographic exploration of the boundary between the “political” and the “non-political” in Corsican bilingual education, suggesting that there is more to it than straightforward antipolitics on the part of the French state. Drawing on the one hand on ethnographic evidence of the potentially productive and enabling effects of boundaries drawn between the political and the non-political and on the other hand on Jacques Rancière’s performative definition of the political, this article suggests that anthropology might benefit from an explicit rethinking of what we mean by “the political”—and where, if at all, and with what effects we might imagine it to “end.”

Comparative Relativism: Symposium on an Impossibility

This introduction to the Common Knowledge symposium titled “Comparative Relativism” outlines a variety of intellectual contexts where placing the unlikely companion terms comparison and relativism in conjunction offers analytical purchase. If comparison, in the most general sense, involves the investigation of discrete contexts in order to elucidate their similarities and differences, then relativism, as a tendency, stance, or working method, usually involves the assumption that contexts exhibit, or may exhibit, radically different, incomparable, or incommensurable traits. Comparative studies are required to treat their objects as alike, at least in some crucial respects; relativism indicates the limits of this practice. Jensen argues that this seeming paradox is productive, as he moves across contexts, from Levi-Strauss’s analysis of comparison as an anthropological method to Peter Galison’s history of physics, and on to the anthropological, philosophical, and historical examples offered in symposium contributions by Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Marilyn Strathern, and Isabelle Stengers. Comparative relativism is understood by some to imply that relativism comes in various kinds and that these have multiple uses, functions, and effects, varying widely in different personal, historical, and institutional contexts that can be compared and contrasted. Comparative relativism is taken by others to encourage a “comparison of comparisons,” in order to relativize what different peoples—say, Western academics and Amerindian shamans—compare things “for.” Jensen concludes that what is compared and relativized in this symposium are the methods of comparison and relativization themselves. He ventures that the contributors all hope that treating these terms in juxtaposition may allow for new configurations of inquiry.

Habituating Meerkats and Redescribing Animal Behaviour Science

This article examines influential recent arguments in science studies which stress the interactive and mutually transformative nature of human-animal relations in scientific research, as part of a broader ontological proposal for science as material engagement with the world, rather than epistemic detachment from it. Such arguments are examined in the light of ethnography and interviews with field biologists who work with meerkats under conditions of habituation. Where philosophers of science stress the mutually modifying aspect of scientific interspecies relationality, these researchers present habituation as a way to study meerkats ‘in the wild’, and to access their putatively natural, undisturbed, behaviour. Building on this contrast, I will argue that the logic of scientific habituation remains difficult to grasp as long as we think of it exclusively in terms of human-animal relations. The seeming ‘paradox’ of habituation – the idea that it transforms precisely that which it aims to hold stable, namely the ‘wildness’ of animals – is an artefact of a frame of analysis which takes animals to be the object of the science of animal behaviour. Habituation ceases to look paradoxical, however, if we remain faithful to these researchers’ own interests, for whom the scientific object does not coincide with the animal as a whole, but is rather only a selected subset of its behaviour. In conclusion I suggest that this account of habituation sheds a new light on the articulations and disjunctions between diverse practices and commitments in social anthropology, philosophy and biological science.

The Fieldsite As Device

This paper explores fieldsites as devices, in the sense, given in the introduction to this special issue, of ‘patterned teleological arrangements’. Drawing on a discussion of my own ethnographic fieldwork with field behavioral ecologists, the article seeks to parse the insights of two literatures, namely the emergent interest in scientific fieldwork in STS and history of science, and the long-standing discussion of ethnographic fieldwork within sociocultural anthropology. Insofar as my ethnographic fieldsite is also to their biological fieldsite, this not just a straight ‘comparison’ of methodological devices, but also an account of how two differently configured devices come to interface, and where and to what extent they differ.

Resisting Victimhood in Corsica

In recent years, the French media have increasingly focused on the incidence of racism against Franco‐Maghrebians in Corsica. On an island which has long been the locus of a minority nationalism organized on an anti‐colonial frame of reference, this new problematic challenges and unsettles fixed binaries of victim/perpetrator, powerful/powerless, majority/minority. While for some, this new development reveals the “underlying xenophobia” of Corsican nationalism, for others, this is just the latest episode in France’s age‐old “defamatory misrepresentation” of the island. Rather than attempt to adjudicate this debate, the article unpicks its discursive regularities. At stake in these complex politics of victimhood are issues of the representative (which instances are typical?) and the commensurable (which comparisons are acceptable?)—both of which are central also to anthropological accounts of victimhood. As a result, this case study raises some issues concerning anthropological comparison.

This is (not) like that

Comment on van der Veer, Peter. 2016. The value of comparison. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.