Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Beyond agency

2010; Routledge; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00438243.2010.520856

1470-1375

John Robb,

Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation

Abstract Abstract Agency theory has been used in archaeology for over twenty years now. During that time what agency has meant and the problems it has been used to study have changed dramatically. In this article I explore the evolution of the concept through three distinct interpretations of the concept, and discuss what ‘agency’ means at present and where it is going. The concept of agency has been subsumed into a more flexible view of past societies as built around relationalities (of personhood, of materiality and of fields of action). One way to use such a concept is demonstrated through a brief case study of routine and habitus in Neolithic southern Italy. As this case study implies, ‘agency’ as a capacity for action has to be historicized in specific contexts rather than used generically. Keywords: Agencyarchaeological theorypersonhoodfield of actionNeolithicItalyroutine Acknowledgements I am grateful to Matthew Johnson, Robin Osborne and Elizabeth DeMarrais for helpful comments upon this manuscript, and to my students with whom I have discussed these issues. I am also grateful to my colleagues in the Bova Marina Archaeological Project, particularly Kostalena Michelaki and Helen Farr. John Robb University of Cambridge Notes For example, Turner's work on dramas and fields of symbolism parallels some of Bourdieu's on habitus and strategy (see Turner (1988 Turner, V. 1988. The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ. [Google Scholar]) on the role of performance in social reproduction), and Turner's insights on polysemy approach Bourdieu's discussion of the ‘loose logic’ of symbols. ‘Doxa is the relationship of immediate adherence that is established in practice between a habitus and the field to which it is attuned, the pre-verbal taking-for-granted of the world that flows from practical sense’ (Bourdieu 1990 Bourdieu, P. 1990. The Logic of Practice, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]: 68). Habitus as a system of bodily dispositions is thus both a sub-area of doxa, in the sense that we can have doxic beliefs about things not immediately of the body, and the medium through which doxa is generated (e.g. in Bourdieu's example of the Kabyle house, the meanings of space are generated through the action of bodily movement through it). Interestingly, there has also been a countervailing strand of common-sense interpretation which attributes transformative powers to things. This historically turns up in social campaigns against ‘agents of destruction’ such as weapons, drugs or alcohol or for practices of improvement such as cleanliness and hygienic practices.