Synopses & Reviews
Agency is a key theme that cross-cuts a wide raft of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and beyond; yet it is invariably discussed separately behind closed disciplinary doors. Within archaeology, agency has been characterized as a uniquely human attribute, and a means of incorporating individual intentionality into theoretical discourse. In other domains, however, notions of non-human and 'material' agency have been finding currency, and it is our aim to introduce some of these themes into archaeology and develop a non-anthropocentric approach to agency. It is anticipated that such a perspective will not only help us achieve more convincing interpretations of the past, giving a more active role to material culture, but also throw new light on the changing role of artifacts in the present and the future. This book is a groundbreaking attempt to address questions of non-human and material agency from a wide range of perspectives and disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, sociology, cognitive science, philosophy, and economics. The editors and authors demostrate that a distributed, relational approach to agency, incorporating both humans and artifacts, has important ramifications for how we understand material culture.
Synopsis
The idea of an a oeagenta in the social sciences connotes a person or persons whose motivation, intentions or goals bring about change. Along with this, agency is believed to be a uniquely human attribute. This belief comes from a deeply entrenched assumption that agency is a property, attribute or capacity processed solely by human entities, be they individual or collective. The corollary is that no human entities are deemed to be devoid of agency a although they may often be entangled in human actions, they never have the initiative and thus play a purely secondary role.
In this volume, the editors are challenging this position and examine the possibility that agency is not a solely human property. Instead, this collection of archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists explore the symbiotic relationships between humans and material entities (a key opening a door, a speed bump raising a car) as they engage with one another co-dependently. Such an approach has important ramifications for our ability to understand the role of agency, which was an important theory to Pierre Bourdieu, in relation to material culture.
Synopsis
Thus far an 'agent' in the social sciences has always meant someone whose actions bring about change. In this volume, the editors challenge this position and examine the possibility that agency is not a solely human property. Instead, this collection of archaeologists, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists explores the symbiotic relationships between humans and material entities (a key opening a door, a speed bump raising a car) as they engage with one another.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Material and Nonhuman Agency.- Where Brain, Body and World Collide.-The Argument for Material Agency.- Material Agency, Skills, and History: Distributed Cognition and the Archaeology of Memory.- The Actor-Enacted: Cumbrian Sheep in 2001.- Material Agency, Nature and Place: Trees as Actors.- Intelligent Artefacts at Home in the 21st Century.- In Context: Meaning, Materiality and Agency in the Process of Archaeological Recording.- The Neglected Networks of Material Agency: Artefacts, Pictures and Texts.- Some Stimulating Solutions: Experiencing the Dynamic Images on Irish Passage Tombs.- The Outward Clash: On Experience, Mediation and Material Agency in the Peircean Semiotic.- Concluding Remarks 1: When ANT meets SPIDER: Social theory for arthropods.- Concluding Remarks 2: Agency, Networks, Past and Future