Agency Uncovered

Archaeological Perspectives on Social Agency, Power, and Being Human

Andrew Gardner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138404335
• eBook ISBN: 9781315435190
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book questions the value of the concept of 'agency', a term used in sociological and philosophical literature to refer to individual free will in archaeology. On the one hand it has been argued that previous generations of archaeologists, in explaining social change in terms of structural or environmental conditions, have lost sight of the 'real people' and reduced them to passive cultural pawns, on the other, introducing the concept of agency to counteract this can be said to perpetuate a modern, Western view of the autonomous individual who is free from social constraints. This book discusses the balance between these two opposites, using a range of archaeological and historical case studies, including European and Asian prehistory, classical Greece and Rome, the Inka and other Andean cultures. While focusing on the relevance of 'agency' theory to archaeological interpretation and using it to create more diverse and open-ended accounts of ancient cultures, the authors also address the contemporary political and ethical implications of what is essentially a debate about the definition of human nature.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Social Agency, Power, and Being Human

Andrew Gardner

The systematic study of the relationship of the individual to society has, from its very beginning, been marked by acrimonious contention over both its proper procedure and its goal.

Schutz 1967: 3

An Interdisciplinary Problem

The problem of agency is, in many respects, the problem of the human condition. It concerns the nature of individual freedom in the face of social constraints, the role of socialisation in the forming of 'persons', and the place of particular ways of doing things in the reproduction of cultures. In short, it is about the relationships between an individual human organism and everyone and everything else that surrounds it. It is no surprise, then, that the literature on the subject across the human sciences is vast - and expanding. Within this context, the present volume represents the continuing engagement of archaeologists with these issues, insofar as they are essential considerations in understanding people in the past and their ways of life, or 'life-worlds' (Schutz and Luckmann 1973: 3). As such, it is also indicative of the widening commitment of practitioners in the discipline to addressing the diversity of human life - past and present - at a profound level.

In part, this book is a response to the call for dialogue on the subject of agency framed by Dobres and Robb (2000: 4), taking up some of the questions posed in their volume, as well as others that have emerged in the ongoing debate upon how archaeologists can best proceed towards understanding the historical constitution of human societies (cf. also Dornan 2002; Ortner 2001). The goal of this volume is to focus attention on three main themes within this debate: the problematic notion of individualism; the connection between agency and power; and the relationship between definitions of agency and of what it is to be 'human'. These are all themes which have arisen in archaeologists' confrontations with past ways of life, but which also bear strikingly upon current discussions across a range of disciplines. My aim in this Introduction is to summarise some of these debates, and in doing so to demonstrate how the chapters included in this volume will help to move them forward.

Although Alfred Schutz's remark which opened this chapter was first published (in German) in 1932, and was part of a commentary on the previous half-century of scholarship, it could be argued that little has changed since then. Disagreement is still commonplace, particularly over the success - or otherwise of the widely-cited ideas of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu, who might both be labelled 'structurationists' (Parker 2000:5) - that is, theorists who attempt to unite 'the individual' (agency) and 'the social' (structure) within a single analytical framework. Their work, following on from that of some of the leading figures of late 19th and earlier 20th century sociology, philosophy and social psychology (e.g. Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Elias, Parsons, Goffman, Mead, Merleau-Ponty), has been extremely influential, in practical ways, in a wide range of fields, including accountancy, geography, and of course archaeology (Bryant and Jary 2001; Jenkins 1992). At the same time, the theoretical debate has continued around the key concepts developed by Giddens and Bourdieu, such as the duality of structure (Parker 2000) and habitus (Crossley 2001), as well as opening up areas of enquiry that they have tended to neglect, like the place of ethics (Barnes 2000), emotion (Archer 2000) or temporality (Emirbayer and Mische 1998) in theories of agency.

All this is in spite of the fact that these two individuals turned to other, albeit related, interests during the 1990s, having published their most influential 'structurationist' works in the 1970s and 1980s. Anthony Giddens has increasingly engaged with practical politics in his recent publications (e.g. 2000), and the same was true for Pierre Bourdieu before his death in 2002 (e.g. 1999). The connection that Giddens and Bourdieu have made, implicitly or explicitly, between academic theory and politics is actually an important issue to pursue at a later stage. For now, we must remain with the 'structuration' debate, and examine it in more detail as the background for the three sections which follow. Although it is Giddens who is primarily associated with the term 'structuration', Bourdieu's work has also been given this label, as their agendas have much in common (Parker 2000: 5). In essence, both scholars attempt to unite the concerns of micro-, actor-centred sociologies and macro-, structure-centred sociologies, by positing a framework which connects both levels in a strongly recursive fashion. Thus, rather than arguing that actors are the fundamental units upon which all else that is 'social' builds, or conversely that individual action is wholly determined by social forces (cf. e.g. Garfinkel for the former view [1984 (1967)]; Parsons for the latter [1951]; Parker 2000: 14-36), Giddens and Bourdieu put forward a mechanism to bring these two approaches firmly together.

For Giddens, this is the duality of structure, a simple equation that makes actors dependent upon the rules and resources of structure, but allows them knowledgable and conscious choice in manipulating these. The latter creates room for change, while the former ensures structural reproduction through more routine actions (Giddens 1993 [1976], 1979, 1984). For Bourdieu, the key concept is habitus, which effectively accommodates the duality of structure within a single framework of shared dispositions that simultaneously constrain and enable individual actors (Bourdieu 1977 [1972], 1990 [1980]). Now, it will be left for later sections, and individual chapters within this volume, to discuss in detail the utility or otherwise of these specific accounts of social life. Suffice it to say here that much of the debate in the social sciences more broadly has focused - whether in agreement or disagreement - upon these two sets of approaches (which, interestingly, have rarely been compared by their authors [Parker 2000: 39-40]).

Critics of the structurationist approach include Margaret Archer and Nicos Mouzelis, who have both argued that, while a balance between agency and structure has to be maintained, it is nonetheless necessary to avoid conflating these concepts within a single framework. Rather, an analytical dualism should be kept intact to allow us to see what is particular about actors and what is particular about structures (Archer 1996 [1988], 1995, 2000; Mouzelis 1995; Parker 2000: 69-101). In this vein, Archer has argued for a multi-level understanding of agency (2000), which succeeds in incorporating aspects such as emotionality (see below). This work draws on a number of other inspirations too, such as the writings of Rom Harre, and this reminds us of the obvious fact that there are many other independent traditions dealing with the self/society problem which Bourdieu and Giddens sometimes refer to, and sometimes ignore - traditions as diverse as psychoanalysis, Foucauldian post-structuralism, queer theory, and American pragmatism (cf. Cohen 2000; Elliott 2001; Emirbayer and Mische 1998). Threads from some of these traditions are woven into a number of chapters in this book, and they can certainly help us here in addressing the three main problems which have arisen in both archaeological and broader consideration of the dominant 'structuration' problem: whether agency is confined to individuals (and if so of what kind?); how it relates to power; and what the implications of agency theory are for definitions of humanity and human rights.

Agency = Individual?

A major component of the problem of agency is whether this term refers to an essential property of individuals, or whether it lies somehow in the relationships between individuals, a possibility which might also afford us a notion of 'collective agency'. In either case, another question is begged: what do we mean by individuals? This kind of issue is addressed in various ways by the first group of chapters in the present volume. As I note in Chapter 3, such a question is very much at the heart of the critical debate over the social theories of Giddens, rather more so than for Bourdieu (cf. Bohman 1999; see next section), in both sociology and archaeology. Giddens has been accused of making his actors too self-oriented, with too much self-reflexivity and potential for self-mastery, and thus as too abstract and disembodied (Elliot 2001: 41; Gregory 1989: 211-13; Moore 1994: 49-53). Within the archaeological literature, this has been echoed in accusations that Giddens' actors embody an ethnocentric and androcentric individualism (Gero 2000: 37-38; MacGregor 1994: 80-85), and that by defining agency as a property of competent, knowledgable and corporeal beings (Giddens 1984:1-14, 220), Giddens produces a model which may be at odds with alternative kinds of self-understanding that archaeologists could encounter in the past.

That there is more than one way of understanding the individual person is not in doubt, as a number of anthropological studies have confirmed (Burr 2002: 4-10). Marcel Mauss, for example, surveyed a range of these, in contexts as diverse as Zuñi pueblos and ancient China, as well as charting the origins of the Western self in pagan and early Christian Rome (Mauss 1979: 59-94; cf. Carrithers et al. (eds.) 1985; Gardner 2003; Morris 1991). But, to be fair to Giddens, not only have his attempts to deal with the problem of individualism through the mechanisms of the duality of structure been less than fully appreciated by some critics (although these mechanisms have also drawn criticism for making actors' lives excessively routinized [Cohen 1994: 21-22; Mouzelis 1995: 119-20] - see the next section), he is also focusing primarily on the conditions of modernity (Cohen 1989: 123, 153; Elliot 2001: 41; cf. Giddens 1984: 180-206). These have long been recognised - by writers such as Marx, Durkheim, Simmel and Weber - as involving a historically-unusual degree of alienation between the individual and society, even if these writers have also tended to essentialise such a division (Burkitt 1991: 8-27).

In addition to the anthropological work noted above which suggests that this division is anything but essential, there is a considerable body of classical and recent literature emphasising the social nature of human persons, and the role of 'others' in the constitution of the 'self', even in modern societies. This includes the 'figurational' approach of Norbert Elias, which embeds people in networks of interdependence (Elias 1978 [1970]; Bauman 1989), and the work of John Macmurray on the 'form of the personal', which argues strongly for a social view of agency (1957; 1961). Perhaps most successful, and enjoying renewed attention in sociology, philosophy and social psychology (e.g. Aboulafia 1999; Burkitt 1991; Joas 1996 [1992]; Emirbayer and Mische 1998), if not yet archaeology (though cf. Richardson 1989; Gardner 2003), is the work of George Herbert Mead and his colleagues in the pragmatist school of American philosophy. Mead's stress on the role of other people - and of physical objects - in the constitution of the self again spreads agency into an intersubjective space (Mead 1934; cf. Crossley 1996; McCarthy 1984), implying that while we cannot conceive of agency without individual human organisms, agency exists only by virtue of the relationships between those organisms. Giddens certainly goes a good way down this road, but there is considerable potential for constructive criticism from these other kinds of sources.

The connections between organic individuals and social persons and groups are addressed in this volume by Stephen Shennan (Chapter 2), from an evolutionary perspective, in ways which highlight the deficiencies of an overly-individualistic view of agency Ironically, this is a view which Archer, one of Giddens' fiercest critics, has fallen into in arguing for the priority of the 'self' over the 'social'. Archer also tends to equate 'the social' with language, as against 'practice' which is prior but less social (2000: 121-90, 253-82, 306-19). To the contrary, archaeologists are in a good position to demonstrate the social nature of material practices, as illustrated by all the chapters in this section. In this way, we have the potential to provide not only a social account of selfhood, but also an account of how groups of people can come to develop their own agentic capabilities (elaborated further in Chapter 3; cf. Archer 2000: 261-305; Giddens 1984:220-21).

This offers a way through another aspect of the 'individualism' problem, raised by both Justin Morris and Brad Gravina (Chapters 4 and 5), which has to do with the nature of archaeological individuals. There has been considerable debate about whether 'digging for agency' simply means looking for the actions of single people (e.g. Barrett 2001; Dobres 2000; Hodder 2000; Johnson 1989). The view of agency outlined above would imply that this is certainly not the case, and may even be taken to suggest that this is not only unnecessary but, on one level, impossible - and not merely because of the obstacles of site formation processes. All agentic processes are social, and thus, as Morris and Gravina ably demonstrate, patterns of practices which inevitably transcend single organisms can still indicate different balances of tradition and transformation.

Agency = Power?

Having outlined the ontological status of agency vis-à-vis different social entities, we can elaborate this by pursuing the question of what kind of relationship agency actually is. The key problems here are to do with intentionality, ideology, practice and reflection, and again they beg questions of archaeological visibility. Despite the diversity of current definitions of agency (Dobres and Robb 2000: 8-10), the term usually has something to do with power. 'Power' is itself a notoriously ambiguous concept, at the same time as being one which sits very firmly on the boundary between academic and political debates (Dowding 1996). It is common a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the contributors
• List of figures
• 1 Introduction: social agency, power, and being human
• Part 1: Social Agency
• Part 2: Agency and Power
• Part 3: Being Human
• Commentary
• Index