ANT411H5 S

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ANT411H5 S
Topic 11 Social Agency
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Dobres Robb 2000 Agency in archaeology
Paradigm or platitude? The cat's pajamas or the
Emperor's new clothes?
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Dobres Robb 2000
Agency has become the buzzword of contemporary
archaeological theory.
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Dobres Robb 2000
In processual archaeology, the agency concept is
fast encroaching into the theoretical vacuum left
by the collapse of high-level systemic models
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Dobres Robb 2000
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.
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Dobres Robb 2000
Unlike other key concepts, some version of agency
is endorsed by theorists across the spectrum,
from phenomenology to evolutionary ecology.
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Dobres Robb 2000
The result is the apparent, if not genuine,
possibility of a theoretical consensus
unparalleled perhaps since the 1960s.
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Dobres Robb 2000
If popularity implies theoretical soundness, it
is clear that agency is a Good Thing.
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Social conditions of human life

• Social Relations

• Social Scale

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Social Relations

• family household

• community

• society

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Social Scale
Egalitarian

• unranked (band)

• segmented (tribe)

Stratified

• simple (chiefdom)

• complex (state)

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Hodder 1985 people are active agents in culture
They actively negotiate social rules, creating
and transforming the social structure that is
constructed by the individual.
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Agent

• individual

• group

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Belief Action
Each individual grows and learns by giving
meaning to experiences and by interpreting those
experiences in terms of sets of values that
work, for that individual, in the practice of
daily life.
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Belief Action
habitus systems of durable, transposable
dispositions (Bourdieu 1977)
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Practice

• purposeful behaviour

• action

• habitus

customary practice or conduct
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Dobres Hoffman 1994 Social Agency and the
Dynamics of Prehistoric Technology
Technology is a dynamic cultural phenomenon
embedded in social action, worldviews, and social
reproduction.
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The social dynamics that occur in the course of
day-to-day artifact manufacture, use, repair, and
discard, that is, microscale social dynamics
involving individuals and small-scale groups, are
an underdeveloped topic in archaeological research
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Although factors such as raw material constraints
and environmental conditions help to structure
technologies, dynamic social processes involving
individuals and small-scale groups also play a
major part
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As is the case with language, kinship structures,
and ideology, technology is a complex cultural
phenomenon embedded in historically specific
worldviews, strategic social action, and human
agency more generally
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Scale
A microscalar perspective highlights the dynamic
nature of prehistoric technological action within
heterogeneous social communities
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Scale
and recognizes that prehistoric production was
a meaningful and socially negotiated set of
material-based practices, as well as a technical
means by which to make things.
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Context
Technologies are not practiced in a cultural
vacuum where physical laws take precedence.
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Materiality
it is only through detailed empirical
identification of technical attributes,
sequences, and chaines operatoires that a more
comprehensive and anthropological understanding
of prehistoric technology can emerge.
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Social Theory
To understand the social dynamics of technology,
particularly those occurring at the microscale, a
body of social theory is needed
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Social Theory
that can relate technical knowledge and action
to social knowledge and action and to general
social reproduction.
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Social Constitution of Technology
While technology clearly is material, it is
enacted within culturally and historically
specific contexts of dynamic social interaction
and meaning-making
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Social Constitution of Technology
It is for this reason that microscale social
processes central to the daily production of
material existence become keys to understanding
how technological systems work.
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Social Constitution of Technology
Technology equally concerns social interaction
(e.g., divisions of labor), belief systems (e.g.,
origin myths and their relationship to the
cultural and physical landscape), and practical
knowledge of techniques and the environment
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Social Constitution of Technology
The complex webs interconnecting the material
with the social, political, economic, and
symbolic experiences of human existence take on
tangible dimensions.
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Social Constitution of Technology
two primary approaches to the social dimensions
of technology can be identified
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"worldview" perspective
Why does technology take the various specific
forms that it does?
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"worldview" perspective
What is it about a society's belief system and
social practices that play a part in structuring
the techniques and forms of organization of a
particular technological system?
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"woridview" perspective
What does an analysis of material techniques
involved suggest about a society's worldview?
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dynamic social processes of technological activity
Because it is through social relations of
production that technologies are enacted
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dynamic social processes of technological activity
empirical aspects of prehistoric raw material
modification can be studied as a "window" into
those social relations
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Prehistoric Technology and Theories of Social
Agency
Human agents constantly rationalize their actions
and act strategically within historically
specific contexts and within culturally defined
boundary conditions
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Prehistoric Technology and Theories of Social
Agency
but other forces impinge on individual agency
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Prehistoric Technology and Theories of Social
Agency
(1) other actors and larger social communities,
groups, and affiliations
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Prehistoric Technology and Theories of Social
Agency
(2) the spatial contexts of the built and natural
environment
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Prehistoric Technology and Theories of Social
Agency
(3) history (antecedent social conditions)
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Prehistoric Technology and Theories of Social
Agency
and especially (4) issues of power played out in
the social arena.
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Redefinition of Technology
technology is the expression of practical
knowledge and is effected through knowledgeable
practice.
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Redefinition of Technology
To integrate knowledge, technology, and technique
is to highlight the inseparability of knowledge,
practice, and experience in all productive
endeavors
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Hodder 2000 Agency and Individuals in Long-term
Processes
scale, intentionality indeterminacy
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Scale
On the one hand, the processes observed by
archaeologists stretch out over spans of time
which are difficult or impossible for individual
actors to comprehend or perceive.
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Scale
On the other hand, archaeological understanding
of the long term is built up from traces of the
smallest and least significant of acts.
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Scale
I argue that archaeologists have come to focus on
agency and on the construction of individuals,
selves, and subjects.
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Scale
I argue that this constructivist position is
inadequate, and particularly inappropriate for
dealing with the particularity of archaeological
data the radical differences of scale.
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Scale
I argue that there is a need to shift from agency
and the construction of social beings, to
individual narratives of lived lives and events.
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intentionality
individual actors actively used material culture
(Hodder 1982) in their competing, contradictory
and changing strategies.
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indeterminacy
Rather than large-scale systems and processes in
which individuals were caught and determined,
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indeterminacy
the theoretical focus on the individual
underlines the idea that human beings were able
to monitor the effects of their actions and act
in novel, creative ways.