Matei Candea

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My research centres on the nature and limits of relationality. This thread runs through my doctoral work on relationship and alterity in Corsica, my interest in the radically anti-essentialist and micro-relational work of Gabriel Tarde, a once-forgotten French sociologist for whom "every thing is a society, and every phenomenon a social fact", and my most recent research project: an ethnographic exploration of interspecies sociality between biologists and the meerkats they study in the Kalahari desert. This project dovetails with a broader collaborative, ESRC-funded initiative focused on the productive and efficacious aspects of detachment.

-> Walking with Meerkats . A new research project in the making

Watch this space...!

-> Reconsidering detachment: the ethics and analytics of disconnection

This ESRC funded project (which I am undertaking together with Tom Yarrow, Joanna Cook and Catherine Trundle), aims to create an interdisciplinary exploratory network of scholars concerned with the productive aspects of detachment. Rather than treating detachment simply as the moral inversion of compassion and engagement, our aim is to explore a range of contexts within which distance and disconnection can offer meaningful and/or effective frameworks for action.

-> Tarde/Durkheim: Trajectories of the social

What if one of the most challenging definitions of the social yet, had been elaborated over a century ago, and then forgotten? Why has the work of a largely unknown 19th century French sociologist come to appear remarkable once again at this particular juncture, drawing the interest of some of the most prominent and widely read theorists in contemporary social science?

Following an interdisciplinary conference in Cambridge on the 14th-15th of March 2008, which explored the interface of Tardean and Durkheimian sociologies, an edited volume around the work of Gabriel Tarde is in production with Routledge. Please click below for the conference report.

-> Corsica, relationality and alterity

My doctoral research focused on knowing and alterity in Corsica, tracing the evanescent ways in which knowledge about and knowledge of particular places, people and stories is distributed and woven through day-to-day interactions. I followed the unexpected interplay between such 'inter-knowledge' (interconnaîssance) and the distinctions, breaks and ruptures produced by administrative, political and academic attempts to frame peoples and places as whole, ordered and mutually exclusive. Paradoxically, and counter to some well-established assumptions in the anthropology of identity, I argued that for those 'outsiders' wishing to become connected, to become known, to become something other than what they are, open-ended relationality can be just as problematic as clear-cut categorisation.
Trying to keep in view such individual and collective processes of 'becoming-other' in turn raises a problem of anthropological method. In Corsica, the difference or otherwise of a Corsican collective from the broader French polity is an issue of ongoing and impassioned debate. This led me to ask whether we can imagine an anthropological heuristic which doesn't start from sameness in order to study the construction of difference, or start from radical alterity in order to make connections, but rather opens up a space in which relationships and distinctions can both be seen as emergent.