Professor Matei Candea

From 2016-2022, I was the PI on the Risking Speech project, a comparative study of the ethics, epistemics, politics and material infrastructures of freedom of speech in a range of locations in and beyond Europe. Risking Speech was funded by a European Research Council (ERC) grant entitled ‘Situating Free Speech’ under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. 

My doctoral research (PhD Cambridge 2006) focused on identity, alterity and belonging on the island of Corsica. The resulting book, Corsican Fragments (2010), and a range of associated publications explored a number of interrelated themes: the historical politics of knowledge and mystery surrounding the island of Corsica and its emergence as a potent ‘internal other’ for France; the contemporary intersection between materiality, languages and senses of place on the island; the ways in which intimations of alterity and relatedness arise from everyday micro-interactions in village space; the politics and poetics of hospitality; dynamics of identity, racism and republicanism in contemporary France. 

This ethnographic research led me to reconsider a number of classic methodological and theoretical questions: in particular, the practice of bounding and extending ethnographic field-sites; the effect of current anthropological understandings of the category of ‘the political’; the question of what it might mean to ‘take seriously’ the people one is working with. This launched an enduring interest in anthropological heuristics, whose current instance is a book on the theory and practice of anthropological comparison, Comparison in Anthropology: The Impossible Method, published with Cambridge University Press (2018). 

My first post-doctoral work took the question of knowledge and alterity to a different field: that of inter-species relations in scientific research. I studied the conceptual and material relations between humans and other animals in behavioural biology, with a particular focus on researchers who study meerkats. As in the Corsican case, the focus was on the ways in which understandings of similarity and difference emerge from situated interactions, the intersections of materiality, sociality and language, and the ways in which knowing and not-knowing constitute and emerge from social, ethical and political relations. A key theme running through this research has been the role of detachment as a simultaneously ethical and epistemic goal, as explored in my coedited book, Detachment: Essays on the limits of relational thinking, published with Manchester University Press (2015).  

Alongside these empirical research projects, I have also been involved in the rediscovery and re-evaluation of the works of the forgotten 19th century French social theorist Gabriel Tarde, whose work provided a challenge to some key elements of what later became the Durkheimian canon, and arguably prefigured some recent developments in philosophy and the social sciences (see Candea (ed.) The social after Gabriel Tarde, Routledge 2010). The book was reissued in a revised and expanded edition in 2016. 

Aside from Cambridge, where I was a lecturer from 2006-2009, I also taught at the University of Durham (2009-2013) and held the position of Velux Visiting Professor at the University of Copenhagen (in Summer-Autumn 2014). I am a fellow and director of studies at King’s College, and was the honorary editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (2013-2016). In 2016, I was awarded the Pilkington Prize for teaching excellence. 

https://www.candea.org/ 

Research interests 

Europe; the Mediterranean; France; The anthropology of Free Speech; science, ignorance and doubt; human-animal relations; Politics of language; Identity, alterity and belonging; French republicanism and its critics; Ethnographic method; The history of social theory; Anthropological heuristics, and in particular the theory and practice of anthropological comparison.