In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

129 The concept of human agency has been widely used in archaeology over the past twenty years, and especially in the last decade (for reviews see Barrett 2001; Dobres and Robb 2000; Dornan 2002; Johnson 1989; Knapp and van Dommelen 2008). Agency theories in archaeology developed, in part, as a corrective to the often bloodless models of social life and change produced by various systemstheoretical and other processual approaches. Their development has been a good thing for the discipline. Agency theories have put people back into culture along with the cognitive factors—for instance, the frameworks of meaning by which people assign significance to events and things—that inform and motivate their actions. They have moved us to think about the freedom or “relative autonomy” that individuals have to maneuver within cultural systems and structures of social power. They have reunited society with history. In so doing, agency theories have rediscovered a key insight of the older Boasian, culture history approach that dominated archaeological thinking before the advent of processual archaeology: that the particulars of local historical context are worth investigating for their own sake, rather than simply serving as fodder for sweeping evolutionary narratives driven by cultural laws. Several scholars have emphasized that individual agency is just one particular form of agency, and that the autonomous individual exercising rational choice and free will is a relatively recent invention specific to modernity (e.g., Thomas 2000; Hodder and Hutson 2003). Thomas (2000), for example, argues 6 Agency and Collective Action Insights from North American Historical Archaeology Dean J. Saitta 130 Dean J. Saitta that humans always carry out their projects in the context of a concrete material world that includes other people. Thus, it is inadequate to consider human beings apart from the relationships in which they find themselves. Barrett (2001) agrees, noting that agency must include the operation of social collectives that extend beyond the individual’s own body and lifespan. Indeed, Johannes Fabian (1994) has noted that human acting is always acting in company. Hodder (2004) helpfully suggests that agency, like power, is less a thing we possess than a capacity that we exercise. With Thomas, he sees the group as forming part of the resources used for individual agency, and thus views group behavior as another form of individual agency. McGuire and Wurst (2002) push the critique of agency theory the farthest, from the standpoint of an explicitly activist archaeology that seeks to engage with the political present. They argue that theories of individual agency in postprocessual archaeology are as ideological as the cultural systems theories that preceded them. They identify the focus on the individual agent as a sustaining belief of modern capitalism. Capitalism depends for its survival on cultural processes that constitute people as free and unfettered individuals. Thus it works, through its cultural forms, to universalize this historically contingent idea. Where this ideology is internalized and taken for granted, it obscures the oppositional nature of class groupings and exploitation in society. It also produces the kind of selfserving “identity politics” that can fragment and debilitate collective movements for change. Thus, McGuire and Wurst find advocacy of individual agency models by scholars intending to use their research to challenge class, gender, and racial inequalities in the modern world to be misguided and contradictory. By embracing the logic, language, and symbolism of individual agency, activist scholars are in fact reinforcing that which they wish to critique. By projecting and universalizing that which is contingent, they help to propagate existing social relations. This notion of agency lacks transformative, emancipatory, and revolutionary potential (Harvey 1973). These critiques are clear in suggesting that individuals are always and everywhere thoroughly enmeshed in a web of social relations. Collective action results from the shared consciousness or solidarity that defines a community of individuals . Such consciousness may be based in class, gender, ethnicity, race, age, physical ability, or some combination of these (and other) identities. People make history as members of social groups whose common consciousness derives from shared existential anxieties, political interests, and social relations. This perspective is evident in the current volume. Citing theorists from Marx through Giddens and Bourdieu, Roscoe (chapter 3) notes that humans are not just selfinterested . Rather, they have multiple, specific interests. Such interests also have “lifetimes”: some are situational, and others more enduring. Carballo (chapter 1) notes that the structure of collective action is contextual and “segmentary”: groups of individuals who cooperate on the basis of certain interests in some settings are adversarial in others...

Share