The significance of the concept of agency for social analysis and theory was most thoroughly explicated by Anthony Giddens. A sociologist by training, Giddens’ work was not aimed at anthropologists, yet his ideas held strong appeal as his account of agency was seen as a way of overcoming various two-headed monsters with which anthropology had wrestled for years. Among these ‘‘central problems’’, to use Giddens’-phrase, were the relationships between structure and agency, society and the individual, free will and determinism, and social change versus social reproduction. In his writings, Giddens investigated the concept of agency in relation to structure, action, and power. These terms and notions comprise the core elements of a new orientation that began to emerge in anthropology in the 1970s, which came to be labeled ‘practice theory’.
The roots of contemporary practice theory can be traced to Marx, his concern with production, and the idea of praxis. The notion of praxis may be understood as a theory of knowledge concerning people’s engagement with the world. In seeking to explain the relationship(s) between human action and systems or structures, e. g., how the system shapes practice and how practice changes or reproduces the system, practice theory provides for an ‘action-oriented’ account of social organization.
Within this framework, structure (or the system) is understood as both the medium and the outcome of action. In other words, structure is the unintended outcome of the agent’s bringing about of effects at the same time that it is the medium through which those effects are achieved. As such, structures do not exist at any point in time or space but are always in a process of becoming (rather than being). This process of becoming is what Giddens refers to as ‘structuration’. Power, and the social relations through which it is manifest, are directly related to the agent’s transformative capacity, or her ability to produce form through work upon the world. Power is a necessary implication of the logical connection between human action and transformative capacity.
In an insightful analysis of emerging theoretical trends in anthropology written two decades ago, Sherry Ortner identified practice (or praxis or action) as the key symbol of a newly developing disciplinary paradigm. She suggested that the interest in practice theory noted in the early 1980s related to increasing disenchantment with the normative views of culture and societies that had held sway within the discipline for generations. Highlighting the work of Anthony Giddens, Pierre Bourdieu, and others, she outlined-how the study of practice was not to be viewed as an antagonistic alternative to the study of systems or structures but rather as a necessary complement to such work.
World History
