agency and social theory: a review of Anthony Giddens

Abstract

In an article recently published in Comparative Studies in Society and History (vol. 26, 1984:126—166), Sherry Ortner plots the course of “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties.” Hers is a remarkable synthesis. She shows that a convergence is occurring in such disparate orientations as marxist thought, the various species of cultural analysis, transactionalism, and structuralism. The most important analytical element of this emergent orientation is the “key symbol” of practice. This in its turn is made up of structure in its various senses and its relationship to action. A fundamental concern is to examine how, in specific settings or social formations, structure is an emergent property of action at the same time that action presupposes structure as a necessary condition for its production. The complex and contingent relations between structure and action are nicely stated in Marshall Sahlins' aphoristic reference to “the practice of the structure and the structure of the practice” (1981 :79). I share Ortner's enthusiasm for the new, new synthesis. It offers the possibility of a real convergence between social history and anthropology. This promises to establish a basis for examining what is coming to be the most critical issue in the study of social and cultural formations, how are they transformed (Sahlins 1981)? There are inevitable difficulties with Ortner's account but she has done a real service in defining the contours in terms of which discussion will take place. Still, a number of questions naturally remain open. Is there really an emergent synthesis that can encompass the idealist metaphysics of David Schneider and the dogmatic materialism of Maurice Bloch? Ortner also does not take up the fundamental question of what shape the ethnographies that emerge out of this synthesis will assume. The acute self-consciousness manifested in so many experimental ethnographies is the product of the shocks given by interpretive theory to the positivist assumptions of much thinking about ethnographic practice. This interpretive turn in ethnographic writing makes it impossible to continue to assume that the ethnographer is the passive recorder of naturally occurring “facts.” It raises fundamental questions about the social determination of the ethnographer's practice which Ortner skirts in her map of the new world of theory. The result is that we increasingly recognize that ethnographies are genres as much as other literary forms, that the categories of ethnographic recording are also socially constructed. Hence, it remains an open question as to whether the old categories of ethnographic analysis inherited from classical political economy are adequate to the new theory. As a relative conservative with respect to innovations in ethnographic format, I remain in fundamental sympathy with Ortner's decision not to question too closely whether new theory will require such different forms of knowing and describing that ethnography will undergo radical change. It really is difficult to ignore, however, the thriving cottage industry in reflexive ethnography, based as it is on the postmodernist awareness that ethnography is as much a “literature of fact” as any other seemingly descriptive genre. Thus we become increasingly aware that how the experiences of cultural others are represented is the product of conventions of ethnography and decisions made by the ethnographer. The new self-consciousness raises the question of how ethnography is implicated in the politics of representation so characteristic of “Orientalist” disciplines. There are various solutions currently being posed. In their anxiety to deny the privileged stance of ethnographers as knowers of cultural others many of the experimental ethnographies resolve their epistemological angst by privileging the experience of the ethnographer over the experience of the subjects of ethnographic research. An important development in ethnographic writing such as the reflexive mood carries with it the danger of sliding into unreflexive solipsism. Still we cannot escape from considerations of the consequences of the function of representation that animate the anthropological enterprise. If there is a politics of representation in anthropology, it is manifested in the style, rhetoric, and context, since, as Clifford (1983) and Marcus and Cushman (1980) have shown, our presentation of social reality is rhetorical in its appeal to authority. At the same time others have examined the complex nature of the social field in which fieldwork takes place (Karp and Kendall 1982). This leads to an open question. Where are we to situate the epistemological break that so many assert anthropology is undergoing? Do the new theory and ethnography rupture the forms of the old in such a way as to constitute a new field of discourse? Will our future students regard The Nuer the way I think of Rivers' The Todas, a work worth reading only as an antiquarian exercise? While I hope not, the possibility remains. Ortner's choices as the avatars of the new anthropology are transitional figures who may teach as much through what they fail to do as through precept. Many of them, such as Pierre I3ourdieu and Marshall Sahlins, are centrally concerned in their work with the relationship of agent to structure and how they may be incorporated into anthropological theory.1 It is this theme that makes the writing of Anthony G iddens so important to Ortner's exposition and so central to much of the current theorizing in anthropology. These issues and more are discussed in Giddens' books. Because of his broad synthetic sweep, Giddens tends to see conceptual difficulties where more narrowly focused discussions may not. This has its own problems, of course. Giddens ventures into treacherous waters unguided by an anthropological map such as Ortner has provided us. When it comes to anthropology, he often runs aground. Still, he has much to offer anthropologists who see agency as a central term in their conceptual equations. As a way of illustrating Giddens' significance for anthropologists, I briefly examine notions of agency in the two anthropologists in whose work Ortner sees the emergent forms of “practice theory,” as she calls it. Pierre Bourdieu's version of practice theory might seem to come close to Giddens' writings about action. Giddens relies on Bourdieu in his most anthropologically relevant book, Central Problems. Bourdieu offers an attractive amalgam of structuralist, marxist, and transactionalist concerns. He provides an analytic frame which allows ethnographers to describe the complex relationships among the agents' strategies, the symbolic forms they invoke in their actions, and the distribution of power in society. As Bourdieu himself recognizes ...