300099 Agency: Anthropological Understandings (S) (SoSe 2016)

Agency represents one of the main concepts in anthropology. It is often used in opposition to structure, norms or conventions, and it is employed to understand and explicate social and cultural transformation. It gained particular popularity in anthropology through the emergence of social movements during the 1960s and 1970s. In these earlier writings agency was often used synonymously with resistance which not only led to a confusion of what counts as defiance but also reduced human action to the binary logic of dominance and subordination. Another stream of writing influenced by liberal theory linked human action to the concepts of self-realization and autonomy. This had the effect that other forms of action whereby free and rational will played little or no role were either ignored or considered as passive and irrational. Both of these understandings of agency came under scrutiny and critique in recent anthropological writings. Thereby many authors stress that agency cannot be used synonymously with resistance, since there is a range of actions through which humans do not attempt to challenge established power positions but rather have different motivations. Resistance in this sense is just one possible type of action. Also the connection between agency and autonomy turned out to be the outcome of specific historical conditions of the Western philosophical tradition and proved to be less essential in other social and cultural contexts.
What then is agency and how can it be defined? Saba Mahmood, in her influential work titled “Politics of Piety” (2006), proposes that instead of hooking agency to one pre-established definition, one should pay attention to the different modalities and concepts of action evolving in particular historical and cultural settings. Context - as Mahmood is stressing - is important, because it constitutes not only change, but also the means through which transformation is possible (65).
In this seminar we aim to trace the different conceptualizations of agency throughout the anthropological literature. In the first half of the class we will read classical texts, while in the second half we will focus on recent anthropological publications, where proximate concepts such as becoming, desire, embodiment, creativity and practice will be discussed as well. This approach will help us not only to trace how the concept of agency evolved in the discipline but also to follow epistemological shifts which influenced the scientific debates concerned with the relationship between individuals and social structure, action and power.