Garden City, NY: Anchor Books. Willerslev, Rane (2007) – Soul hunters: Hunting, animism, and personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs (Berkeley, University of California Press). Chaumeil (eds. The book’s introduction distinguishes between two conventional ways of understanding agency in anthropology: one is agency as a “universal human quality”; the second is a “culturally defined quality” that can only be defined in terms of native practices and ontologies themselves. They suggest that this kind of “logical reversal” allows the ethnographic encounter to create truly novel concepts, rather than just revisiting those of our own making. The following texts take issue with the various ways in which agency has been used (both implicitly and explicitly) in anthropology and calls for greater attention to how specific ethnographic contexts may allow us to reformulate ideas about agency in new ways. Gumperz, John J. and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.) It suggests that Viveiros de Castro’s work on perspectivism is based on a view of “subjects” and “objects” as mutually exclusive identities, which Course argues is derived from the nominative-accusative nature of European languages. [5] These false judgments of agency occur especially under stress, or when the results of the event were ones that the individual desired (also see self-serving biases). [citation needed], Children whose parents oppress their free will tend to show signs of frustration and have trouble exploring their self-identity in adolescence and later in life. As these last two quotes demonstrate, some scholars have used the concept of agency in their work to explain how social structures are formed and reformed. Such an approach requires viewing grammatical constructions as meaningful. For example, when a shaman tames his stone, its power is converted into a condition of individual consciousness. Ateliers d'anthropologie – Revue éditée par le Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. For Bateson, then, agency is rooted in biology. They challenge the tendency in anthropology to assume a separation between words and things, signifier and signified, reality and representation, thus arguing for an openness to the possibility that “things” have su generis meanings. Whereas the moral position of shamanism has become increasingly untenable in Woarani communities, it is primarily human “enemies” (Quichua-speaking people) who today occupy the position of “predatory” others and perform shamanic curing for the Waorani. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ateliers/8516 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ateliers.8516, Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, Goldsmiths, University of London. Turner, V. W. (1969). Social and cultural anthropology: the key concepts. To illustrate this process, the article uses the examples of internet transactions, legal processes, and other contexts where non-humans are attributed agency. [11] In many cases, the social norms for the parental role in a family contributes to the frequent disallowance of their children's agency to be fully shown. Disagreement on the extent of one's agency often causes conflict between parties, e.g. This ability is affected by the cognitive belief structure which one has formed through one's experiences, and the perceptions held by the society and the individual, of the structures and circumstances of the environment one is in and the position they are born into. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. New York, NY: The Free Press. In tracing this genealogy within anthropology, Keane describes how “agency” came to be seen in opposition to “structure” and “culture” itself. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (2004) – Exchanging perspectives: The transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies, Common Knowledge, 10 (3): 463-484. Everett, Daniel (2005) – Cultural constraints on grammar and cognition in Pirahã, Current Anthropology, 46 (4): 621-646. These symbolic links illustrate why the shaman is seldom a publicly recognised position in Parakanã society. Related references:Descola, Philippe (1992) – Societies of nature and the nature of society, in A. Kuper (ed. In the Amerindian context, agency depends not as much on a “reflexive capacity” as it does “its fabrication through ritual and shamanic practice”. By drawing on Amazonian and anthropological conceptualizations of “gendered agency”, it considers how male “fantasies” point to young men’s reduced capacity to demonstrate particular forms of agency associated with male elders and ancestors. Such an approach may be relevant for understanding questions of agency in Amerindian shamanism, and particularly witchcraft, which often involve uncertainties and debates about relations between humans and animals. Agency. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc. Berger, P.L., & Luckmann T. (1966). The article follows Peirce in adopting a highly varied typology of different kinds of interpretants that account for embodied responses, emotions and relatively abstract processes. The book develops a strong theoretical critique of the ways feminist anthropology and subaltern studies have conceptualised agency as a desire for freedom, autonomy and the subversion of social norms. Rumsey, Alan (2003) – Language, desire, and the ontogenesis of intersubjectivity, Language and Communication, 23: 169-187. The Social System. London: Academic Press Inc. Lavie, S., Narayan, K., & Rosaldo, R. (1993). For Leach, “all of us are criminals born by instinct. Social psychologist Daniel Wegner discusses how an "illusion of control" may cause people to take credit for events that they did not cause. More generally, the book calls for moving beyond the historiographic tradition in attempts to understand Amazonian ways of experiencing time. Dixon, Robert (1979) – Ergativity, Language, 55: 59-138. Revue éditée par le Laboratoire d'ethnologie et de sociologie comparative. Willerslev, Rane (2004) – Not animal not not-animal: Hunting, imitation and empathetic knowledge among the Siberian Yukaghirs’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, ns 10: 629-652. (forthcoming) – Burst of breath: Ritual flute music in Amazonia (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press). Personhood and the Body; Bioethics; Ethnopsychology and Emotions; Personhood beyond the Human. The term agency now means many different things for anthropologists. 2While debates about structure and agency have been a central concern in anthropology for decades, only in the past five years or so have anthropologists (particularly in the us) begun to question the philosophical assumptions that underlie academic interests in agency. Giddens, A. Langacker, Ronald (1990) – Concept, image, and symbol: The cognitive basis of grammar (Berlin, Mouton de Gruyter). In A. New rules of sociological method. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo (1998) – Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4 (3): 469-488. The article argues that the strong subject/object opposition common to many European languages is an analogy often represented as Amerindian reality. The “broader” sense of ethnosyntax refers to linguistic constructions in which, although a given morphosyntactic device may not be culturally specific, it does demonstrate culturally specific patterns of use and effects. Thus, for Parsons, the distinction between agency and structure is not entirely warranted as one is intrinsically linked to the other. Keane warns that, in focusing on questions of agency in our attempts to overcome age-old determinisms, we should be weary of simply identifying “freedom” with the domain of ideas. Outline of a theory of practice. The book editors specify how ethnosyntax can be understood in both “narrow” and “broad” senses. Kockelman, Paul (2007) – Agency: The relation between meaning, power, and knowledge, Current Anthropology, 48 (3): 375-401.Like Duranti, Kockelman looks to theorise the multiple dimensions of agency as both a social and semiotic faculty that cuts across the terrain conventionally covered by multiple disciplines. In contrast, Durkheim thought human action was contingent upon “certain structures which implied constraint, even coercion, and which existed and endured over and above the actions of particular individuals, lending to individuals’ acts a certain social and cultural regularity” (Rapport & Overing, 2000, p. 1). (Miami, University of Miami Press). ), Thinking through things: Theorising artefacts ethnographically (New York, Routledge): 141-166. (1992) – Language diversity and cognitive development: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press). In particular, he points to the centrality of agency in the interpretive turn in anthropology, and argues that recent anthropological approaches ranging from the focus on individual subjectivity to global political economy have relied on a similar conceptual genealogy that values agency as “self-interpretation”. Top down processing (understanding of a situation, and other possible explanations) can also influence judgments of agency. Walker suggests that since having a “master” is a prerequisite for personality and intentionality, ‘taming’ is not just about relations of “predation”, but also the role of subordination in forming the subject. Conversions to modernities: The globalization of Christianity (New York, Routledge): 263-273. Carter, Bob and Alison Sealey (2000) – Language, structure and agency: What can realist social theory offer to sociolinguistics?, Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4 (1): 3-20.This article deals with how sociolinguistic research might benefit from further critical engagement with the structure/agency debate in the social sciences. Changes in social structure have also been a target of anthropological writing apropos agency. Leach, E. (1977). She suggests that instead of imposing our own assumptions about who or what has “agency”, as anthropologists we should be open to understanding radically different concepts about responsibility, effectivity, and modes of being. Shopping malls : l'avènement de la modernité ? With regards to human creativity, Edmund Leach explained this by illustrating how it can be rooted in an innate dislike of social structure (1977). In an apparently conventional poststructuralist vein, such a “realist” social theory is claimed to retain a view of the world in which “it is human beings who do things”. Under other conditions, cooperation between two subjects with a mutual feeling of control is what James M. Dow, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hendrix College, defines as "joint agency. ), A companion to linguistic anthropology (New York, Blackwell): 451-473.Duranti addresses the general lack of precision and clarity with which concepts of agency have been communicated across disciplines. parents and children. ant approaches may also provide an interesting comparison to recent studies of non-human agency in Amazonian shamanism. Mahmood, Saba (2005) – Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject (Princeton, Princeton University Press).This ethnography explores the particular kinds of “moral agency” that emerge in a Muslim women’s mosque movement in Egypt.
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