Conceptos de Agencia

Agency

Gell defines agency in the following terms:

Agency is attributable to those persons (and things, see below) who/which areseen as initiating causal sequences… events caused by acts of mind or will orintention…. An agent is the source, the origin, of causal events, independently ofthe state of the physical universe (Gell 1998: 16, his parenthesis).Gell, A. 1998. Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Giddens:

Agency isthe ability to act in particular ways (see Giddens 1984: 9, 15). Giddens, A. 1984. The constitution of society. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Sillar, Bill2009 The Social Agency of Things? Animism and Materiality in the Andes, Cambridge Archaeological Journal,19 (3), 369–79,McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.

Human agency is usually located in both the capacityof people to develop ‘aims’ and the actions theyundertake to try to achieve those aims (Dobres&Robb 2000). Human agency is the ability to bothimagine and enact different actions while continuallyre-evaluating the efficacy of these actions withinchanging situations (Emirbayer&Mische 1998). Aperson’s agency requires self-awareness and volition,but it is socially embedded and constrained withinwide-ranging economic and social structures. One ofthe primary outcomes of our individual agency is toreproduce these structures, often as the unintendedoutcome of our actions(Bourdieu 1977; Giddens1984). Human agency is not the ability to achievespecified aims, a definition that may better describea computer or machine, it is rather the motivationand individual creativity incorporated in the humanbody through which we gain the physical ability toact and engage in social relations. Gardner usefullydefines agency as an active human involvement inthe world

both as a capacity or quality of being human and as aprocess or relationship of engagement with a social andmaterial world. This means that there is no agencywithout individual humans, who have a distinctivelyactive, embodied consciousness, but that equallythere can be no autonomous agent, as this activeconsciousness can only really develop through interaction(fundamentally binding agency to structure)(Gardner 2007, 103 — emphasis in original).

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Material and Nonhuman Agency: An Introduction

C. Knappett and L. Malafouris

…agency as not only the capacity to act, but also the capacity toreflect on this capacity.

…agency (asconsciousness and intentionality)… (2008 pp. ix)