Agency in Archaeology

Marcia-Anne Dobres, John Robb

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317959397
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Agency in Archaeology is the first critical volume to scrutinise the concept of agency and to examine in-depth its potential to inform our understanding of the past. Theories of agency recognise that human beings make choices, hold intentions and take action. This offers archaeologists scope to move beyond looking at broad structural or environmental change and instead to consider the individual and the group
Agency in Archaeology brings together nineteen internationally renowned scholars who have very different, and often conflicting, stances on the meaning and use of agency theory to archaeology. The volume is composed of five theoretically-based discussions and nine case studies, drawing on regions from North America and Mesoamerica to Western and central Europe, and ranging in subject from the late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers to the restructuring of gender relations in the north-eastern US.

Part 1
Editors' introduction

1 Agency in archaeology

Paradigm or platitude?

Marcia-Anne Dobres and John E. Robb

The cat's pajamas or the Emperor's new clothes?

Agency has become the buzzword of contemporary archaeological theory. In processual archaeology, the agency concept is fast encroaching into the theoretical vacuum left by the collapse of high-level systemic models, while in post-processual circles, theorists of all kinds are concerned to understand how acting, feeling, and relating subjects constituted themselves under circumstances beyond their full comprehension or direct control. Unlike other key concepts, some version of agency is endorsed by theorists across the spectrum, from phenomenology to evolutionary ecology. The result is the apparent, if not genuine, possibility of a theoretical consensus unparalleled perhaps since the 1960s. If popularity implies theoretical soundness, it is clear that agency is a Good Thing.

Yet, surprisingly, there has been little direct scrutiny of the concept of agency. Most archaeological applications of agency theory are just that: ad hoc appeals to the concept to make sense of a particular problem or situation. The implication here, bolstered by citations of the ambiguous, often incomprehensible but incontrovertibly high-brow writings of Bourdieu, Giddens, and Foucault, is that the idea of agency in itself is inherently sound: it is only our use of the concept that needs to be worked out. The result is that there is little consensus about what "agency" actually means. Few authors are explicit in their use of the term, nor has there been sustained consideration of basic methodological and epistemological issues so as to make it applicable and appropriate to the premodern past. This absence of a theoretical critique adds to the slippery imprecision with which "agency" is currently used, and its ubiquity masks deep divides among archaeologists invoking the concept. An especially thorny issue here is the relationship between agency theory and our commonsense views of the world. Agency views have spread so rapidly and with so little critical examination that one sometimes suspects they have been used as a bridge to get "beyond" theory and do "real" archaeology. The flip side of common-sense applications of agency theory has been for some archaeologists to dismiss it as mere "hand-waving" which adds little to our understanding of ancient politics and culture.

As things stand, then, agency in archaeology is not a theoretically sophisticated paradigm, but rather a lingua franca - an ambiguous platitude meaning everything and nothing. We regard this as a problematic state of affairs. If the agency concept is useless, it should be deconstructed rather than invoked superficially and discarded when the theoretical winds shift to another quarter. But if it has merit, it deserves deeper consideration and more extensive theoretical elaboration. In the history of archaeology, theoretical movements that have made a lasting contribution to how we view the past have been those that have been subjected to multiple generations of scrutiny, often emerging in a very different form than they began. Without searching critique, current interest in agency is likely to do little more than peak, fade, and provide future historians with a horizon marker for archaeological works dating to the 1990s. If agency theory really is to become useful in understanding ancient people and their contribution to large-scale processes of cultural change if we are to avoid simply slapping agency onto the past like a fresh coat of paint - we must integrate theoretical discourse, archaeological practice, analytic methodologies, and concrete case studies.

The goal of this book is to create a dialogue among archaeologists interested in agency, archaeologists critiquing it, and archaeologists for whom the jury is still out. Rather than arguing for a single view of agency, we have tried to collect as wide a variety of views as possible. Readers will have still other views. The goal is, someday, to do justice to our common interest: the worlds of the past.

Where does "agency" come from? A brief historical overview

Questions about personhood, volition, self-determination, and the nature of consciousness and reasoning can be traced back to Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle. They were central themes in the eighteenth-century writings of John Locke, David Hume, JeanJacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, and the nineteenth-century theorist John Stuart Mill, who together articulated the individual-centered philosophies of free-will, choice, intentionality, and the "purposeful activity of thrifty individuals" that still serve as the ideological basis of Western democracy. The very cornerstones of the social sciences are built on the question of how social institutions and self-determination - structure and agency - drive social reproduction (Archer 1988).

Durkheim's normativism and Parsons' functionalist and formalist theories dominated sociological discussions of agency for much of this century. Parsons (1949), in particular, stressed a utilitarian rationality underlying human decision-making and emphasized perhaps over-emphasized - institutions as pervasive top-down constraints on individual choice (Giddens 1979; Halperin 1994). By the 1960s, this view was codified in the notion of "methodological individualism," which was an attempt to explain the causal relationship between macroscale (constraining) institutions and microscale individual decision-making (choice), based on nomothetic principles of maximization, optimization, and practical rationality (see Clark, this volume). Thus, at about the same time that archaeologists began embracing neo-evolutionary theory and cultural ecology, many sociocultural and economic anthropologists were embracing methodological individualism, especially in the study of contemporary non-capitalist social formations (Halperin 1994).

It is really only in the last two decades that anthropologists have seriously begun to rethink these concepts. Recent agency theory stems in large measure from Garfinkel's pioneering work on ethnomethodology in the 1960s (Garfinkel 1984), and from the writings of Giddens (1979, 1984) and Bourdieu (1977). These foundational works were subsequently taken in a variety of directions by Archer (1988, 1995), Sztompka (1991, 1994a), Storper (1985), Heritage (1987), Cohen (1987), Bryant and Jary (1991), and Kegan Gardiner (1995), among others. According to these theorists, and in contrast to previous paradigms, social agents are viewed not as omniscient, practical, and free-willed economizers, but rather as socially embedded, imperfect, and often impractical people. Agency theorists also talk of a much more interactive (or dialectic) relationship between the structures in which agents exist and, paradoxically, which they create.

In large measure, this shift toward a more humanized and dynamic picture of the negonations taking place between individuals, communities, and institutions has been enabled by a focus not so much on agency and agents, as on practice (Ortner 1984; Turner 1994: 43). Indeed, the roots of contemporary practice theory can be traced back to two of Marx's most of-quoted passages:

men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.

(Marx 1963: 15 [orig. 1869])

As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce.

(Marx and Engels 1970: 42)

All of the core elements of contemporary practice theory are here:

• society is a plurality of individuals who exist only by virtue of the relationships they create during everyday material production (praxis)
• humans produce their cultural histories through praxis, which highlights the processual nature of social reproduction
• individual (or group) free-will and volition are explicitly disavowed, in part because people do not choose the conditions within which they live
• these structural conditions have a strong material basis
• institutional settings and conditions constitute a material world that is made, experienced, and perceived (that is, symbolized and made meaningful) by those living in it (which prefigures agency theories of embodiment, discussed later)
• society exists as the result of antecedent conditions, which gives time and history prominent roles in shaping social formations and the particular practices constituting them.

Marx's focus on praxis was essentially a theory of knowledge concerning people's practical engagement with the world, while his emphasis on production linked material and experiential activity to society, thought, and beliefs (Dobres in press; Tilley 1982).

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Giddens (1979, 1984) reconstituted these elements as part of his critique of the formalism long dominant in sociology. Through his "duality of structure," he argued that people create the conditions and structures in which they live, largely as a result of the unintended consequences of their actions. Structure-building is an ongoing and recursive process between actors and forces beyond their control that is never really completed (cf. Archer 1995; Sztompka 1994b). Parallel to these claims, Bourdieu, once a devout structuralist (e.g., 1973), began questioning how social practice shapes society by concentrating on the taken-for-granted routines of daily life, or habitus, within which people create and become structured by institutions and beliefs beyond their conscious awareness or direct control (Bourdieu 1977).

Thus, by the early to mid-1980s, the question of practice and the dialectic of agencystructure had moved to the mainstream of socio-cultural anthropology (as in Moore 1986; Sahlins 1981; Scott 1985; overview in Ortner 1984). This reconfigured interest in the interplay of actors and structures was also being explored (independently) in philosophy (e.g., Brand 1984; Turner 1994), and feminist and gender studies (overview in Kegan Gardiner 1995; see also Gero, this volume). At the same time, the Annales School was rethinking the temporal relationship between large-scale institutions and small-scale social practices. Braudel's (1980) tripartite division of time into long-term structures, medium-term cycles, and short-term events underlined two especially vexing questions: first, how do structures outlive the agents who create, move through, and change them?; and second, how do short-term events contribute to longer-term processes? (cf. Bintliff 1991; Knapp 1992a).

Agency in archaeology: the theoretical landscape

The first self-proclaimed and epistemologically self-reflective theoretical revolution in modern archaeological theory was the New Archaeology, whose founding charter was laid in 1962 with Binford's article "Archaeology as Anthropology." The New Archaeologists argued that archaeology should be based explicitly on anthropological theory. By anthropological theory, they meant the social evolutionism of Service, Sahlins and Fried, often combined with the concept of ecological adaptation. Culture was conceptualized as a selfregulating and internally integrated system (e.g. Clarke 1968). Significantly, a central tenet of their manifesto was that archaeologists should be ambitious: with the development of new theoretical questions, methodological techniques, and epistemological safeguards, virtually all aspects of ancient social life could be investigated.

The New Archaeology's theoretical manifesto could have led in many theoretical directions, and it is a fascinating question why some, such as agency, became the roads not taken. For example, at the outset of the New Archaeology, Binford (1962) underlined behavioral links between individual political process, symbols, and material culture, and pointed out that people "differentially participate in culture" (Binford 1965), while Redman (1977) suggested that it could be analytically useful to comprehend the "smallest interaction group" possible and to understand how "analytical individuals" contributed to larger-scale social processes such as craft specialization, the organization of large-scale distributive networks, and the rise and fall of complex social formations. In retrospect, theoretical concerns that could have been linked to the question of agency were, instead, equated with the devalued empirical search for the archaeological signatures of individuals. For better or worse, processual archaeologists made "systems" their problem, and agents were encased in a "black box" of no analytic or explanatory importance (cf. Brumfiel 1992; Hodder 1986; Trigger 1989). Archaeologists who did deal with the social roles of individuals, primarily in often very sophisticated discussions of the dynamics of chiefdoms and early inequality, tended to assume political actors motivated by a uniform, commonse...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part 1 Editors' introduction
• Part 2 Thinking agency
• Part 3 Using agency
• Part 4 Commentary
• Part 5 Epilogue
• Index