Abstract: This review describes and critiques some of the many ways agency has been conceptualized in the academy over the past few decades, focusing in particular on practice theorists such as Giddens, Bourdieu, de Certeau, Sahlins, and Ortner. For scholars interested in agency, it demonstrates the importance of looking closely at language and argues that the issues surrounding linguistic form and agency are relevant to anthropologists with widely divergent research agendas. Linguistic anthropologists have made significant contributions to the understanding of agency as it emerges in discourse, and the final sections of this essay describe some of the most promising research in the study of language and gender, literacy practices, and the dialogic construction of meaning and agency.

Summary: In this article, Brettell writes about how social science has historically engaged with the concept of agency within the larger scope of culture. Beginning and ending with a story from her ethnographic research, she concludes that agency is often tied to the wider structure in which it exists, as shown through individual narratives.

Summary: Published in The Journal of Power, Dowding’s article also criticizes the “agency-structure” divide and explores language as a means to understanding how we think about the relationships between people as agents and the structures they seek agency in, primarily through the language we use to describe them.

https://doi.org/10.1080/17540290801943380

Abstract: This book tells the story of how small farmers responded to a free-market onslaught that devastated one of the Western Hemisphere’s most advanced social-democratic welfare states. In the early 1980s, the Latin American debt crisis struck Costa Rica, leading to major cutbacks in the social programs that had permitted the rural poor to attain an acceptable standard of living and a modicum of dignity. Peasants were in the forefront of movements against these cutbacks, marching, blocking highways, and occupying government buildings. In the struggle to preserve their livelihood, the rural poor also formed alliances with wealthy farmers, negotiated with politicians, and embraced and then repudiated charismatic outsiders who came to live among them and to speak in their name. These rural activists combined class-bound politics with concerns about threatened peasant identities, practical analysis with sentimentality, grassroots democracy with conspiratorial secrecy, and selfless sacrifice with opportunism. The small farmers portrayed in this book are worldly, outspoken, exuberant, future-oriented, and fiercely proud. They could hardly be less like the unsophisticated and stoic rustics so prominent in the development literature or those contemporary peasants whose imminent disappearance is endlessly predicted by both right- and left-wing social scientists. The author argues that the experience of rural activism in Costa Rica in the 1980s and 1990s calls into question much current theory about collective action, peasantries, development, and ethnographic research. The book invites the reader to rethink debates about old and new social movements and to grapple with the ethical and methodological dilemmas of engaged ethnography.

Summary: This book by Farmer explores the concept of structural violence with an emphasis on the way that power itself within society leads to cultural inequalities and subsequent violence. The book includes various ethnographic research from different authors as well as theoretical chapters on the concept of power itself.

Summary: This is a collection of Foucault’s seminal essays on power, containing his core philosophical analyses on power within varying areas of life, including politics, sexuality, and medicine. Foucault’s works, as included in this volume, give a broad yet grounded philosophical overview on the concept of power within human societies and history.

Summary from Publisher: Alfred Gell puts forward a new anthropological theory of visual art, seen as a form of instrumental action: the making of things as a means of influencing the thoughts and actions of others. He argues that existing anthropological and aesthetic theories take an overwhelmingly passive point of view and questions the criteria that accord art status only to a certain class of objects and not to others. The anthropology of art is here reformulated as the anthropology of a category of action: Gell shows how art objects embody complex intentionalities and mediate social agency. He explores the psychology of patterns and perceptions, art and personhood, the control of knowledge, and the interpretation of meaning, drawing upon a diversity of artistic traditions–European, Indian, Polynesian, Melanesian, and Australian.

Abstract: Across much of the postcolonial world, Christianity has often become inseparable from ideas and practices linking the concept of modernity to that of human emancipation. To explore these links, Webb Keane undertakes a rich ethnographic study of the century-long encounter, from the colonial Dutch East Indies to post-independence Indonesia, among Calvinist missionaries, their converts, and those who resist conversion. Keane’s analysis of their struggles over such things as prayers, offerings, and the value of money challenges familiar notions about agency. Through its exploration of language, materiality, and morality, this book illuminates a wide range of debates in social and cultural theory. It demonstrates the crucial place of Christianity in semiotic ideologies of modernity and sheds new light on the importance of religion in colonial and postcolonial histories.

Abstract: Using a Peircean theory of meaning, agency may be theorized in terms of flexibility and accountability, on the one hand, and knowledge and power, on the other. In this theory, residential agency, which is closest to notions such as “power” and “choice,” is the degree to which one can control the expression of a sign, compose a sign-object relation, and commit to an interpretant of this sign-object relation. Representational agency, which is closest to notions such as “knowledge” and “consciousness,” is the degree to which one can thematize a process, characterize a feature of this theme, and reason with this theme-character relation. Agency, as a kind of social and semiotic facility, is thereby theorized as multidimensional, graduated, and distributed. This theory allows one to analyze, as concomitant phenomena, the longue durée processes that underlie relatively perduring institutions and the real-time practices that support relatively fleeting interactions. Finally, it highlights the theoretical and empirical terrain shared by linguistic anthropology, science and technology studies, political economy, and critical theory.

Summary from publisher: Politics of Piety is a groundbreaking analysis of Islamist cultural politics through the ethnography of a thriving, grassroots women’s piety movement in the mosques of Cairo, Egypt. Unlike those organized Islamist activities that seek to seize or transform the state, this is a moral reform movement whose orthodox practices are commonly viewed as inconsequential to Egypt’s political landscape. Saba Mahmood’s compelling exposition of these practices challenges this assumption by showing how the ethical and the political are indelibly linked within the context of such movements.