Agency

In anthropology, agency is broadly defined as the socio-culturally mediated capacity to act. Classically, the concept has been used to analyse how people try to influence, or change, their lifeworlds and how they act within, or even resist, powerful structures. The concept entered anthropological debates in the 1980s and was initially closely connected to practice theory, an approach which sought to understand how individuals actively create society while at the same time are being shaped by it. Consequently, many of the early debates on agency revolved around questions of self-determination, creativity, and resistance. Anthropologists studied, for instance, how people, especially those in seemingly powerless positions, managed to pursue their own projects and to subvert—if subtly—colonial, patriarchal, capitalist, or other forms of domination. However, anthropologists have always been wary of reducing agency to liberal—or ‘western’—notions of personal choice, freedom, and autonomy. Instead, a plethora of ethnographic case studies demonstrate how meanings of agency, including who can exercise it and how it is valued, vary across social, cultural, or historical contexts. In more recent times, anthropologists have also drawn attention to networked, relational, and more-than-human forms of agency such as the agency of spirits, ‘nature’, art, or things. This entry provides an overview of the extensive anthropological debates on agency, noting that most anthropologists working on questions of agency today would agree that the relationship between our intentions, our actions, and their effects on the world is much more complex than the term agency—as popularly understood—suggests.