The concepts of practice and agency are closely bound up in the literature and often seem to be used interchangeably. While human agency is necessarily realized through practice, the notion of practice cannot be simply reduced to action because it has a strong element of political and social significance built into its definition. In practice theory, social agents are typically understood as individuals with goals, intentions, and subjectivities who operate within materially and historically given circumstances only partly of their own making. People are assumed to be competent and knowledgeable social actors who may conduct their daily affairs and relations both in strategic and intentional ways, and in routinized, nondiscursive ways. Their actions have both intended and unintended consequences. In the dialectical relationship between the structure within which social actors operate and the consequences of their action, or agency, both structure and agent are continuously and interactively remade.
Several key terms are found within the lexicon of practice theory, the most important among these being agent, agency, structures, and structuration. Agents are the active subjects, the individuals, and social collectivities whose actions are typically understood to be purposive, determined, and knowledgeable. Agents enact rather than possess agency and do so in the context of the socially, materially, and historically given structures of daily life. Agency is the dynamic process through which people construct and express their identity, participate in social life, and materially shape their existence. While agency constitutes a form of involvement with the world expressed through the material practices of mindful agents, it is important to note that not all agents possess the same skills, competence, knowledge, awareness, or foresight. Agency is best understood not as a thing but rather as a quality of many things and the relationships among these.
The structures within which agents and agency operate are constituted by the principles and resources that orient social conduct, including the cognitive and cultural ordering of the world. The structures that shape human agency are visible only through the effects of that agency as translated into social action. In the mutual interdependence of structure and agency, or what has sometimes been called the duality of structure, the structural properties of a system are seen as both the medium and the outcome of the social practices they organize and orient. The concept of structuration, or the process of a structure’s becoming through the action and agency of knowledgeable actors, describes this recursive relationship and underscores the virtual quality of structures, which do not exist at any point in time or space but rather exhibit tendencies in action. The idea of structuration refers to ‘‘the ongoing production, maintenance, and transformation of societal institutions as well as the material, social, and symbolic conditions within which people exist and through which they reproduce and transform themselves’’ (Dobres 2000: 133).
Archaeologists who take practice theory as their analytical framework tend to divide into one of two camps fissuring along the dimension of intentional-ity. On one side are those who view the intention-ality of agents and their actions as the key aspect of agency. Within this school of thought, individuals are typically assumed to act strategically to advance their own interests. The social agents in these scenarios tend to be portrayed as rational actors interested in maximizing some element of their economic, political, or symbolic capital, their motives often taken to be autonomously constructed and universal. An extreme version of this view informs some of the Darwinian and evolutionary ecology approaches that have adopted the concept of agency.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who stress the nondiscursive qualities and unintended outcomes of mindful human action as most significant. From this perspective, what agents want or intend is often irrelevant to the real social consequences of their actions. The most important effect is rather seen to be the unwitting reproduction of the social structures within which agency is enacted. While it is recognized that social agents do often act with explicit intent and goals, it is simultaneously understood that they also often act in routinized, habitual ways in the course of everyday life. Acknowledgement of both kinds of agency in archaeological investigation comes closest to the theoretical concerns and analytical frames developed by Bourdieu and Giddens.
As various scholars have noted, the study of agency cannot be separated from a study of structure. Agency only exists in a dialectical relationship to structure. In other words, one cannot talk about the agency of individual social actors without simultaneously taking into account the cultural background of those actors and the cultural structures within which those actors operate. While agency and structure are analytically distinct, they are nevertheless entwined each can be seen as the product of the other when viewed at different points in time. To understand human agency in the past, it is critical that archaeologists engage the mutuality of structure and agency, focusing equally on the antecedent historical conditions - the habitus from which the actor draws, as well as on individual action and intent.
World History
