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Doing being, embodying structure, and the practice of social norms

Doing being, embodying structure, and the practice of social norms

Ryan Schram
ANTH 2700: Key debates in anthropology
ryan.schram@sydney.edu.au
Social Sciences Building 410 (A02)
Week of March 24, 2025 (Week 5)

Slides available at https://anthro.rschram.org/2700/2025/5

Main reading: Prentice (2015)

Other reading: Ortner (2006); Ortner (1984); Bourdieu (1990)

What is this thing called agency?

Do you have agency?

Where does this word apply for you? Where do you see yourself as an agent?

Where do you see other people as agents or as bearers of agency?

What is the opposite of agency?

Talk amongst yourselves about this for one minute.

Agency means many things

The entry for agency, n. in the Oxford English Dictionary is a mile long (see “Agency, n.” 2024).

II. Action, capacity to act.

• II.4. Ability or capacity to act or exert power; active working or operation; action, activity.
  • For instance, I know what we are supposed to do, but I can exercise agency to achieve what I think is best.
• II.5.a. Action or intervention producing a particular effect; means, instrumentality, mediation.
  • For example, I just do what the policy says. The University accomplishes its aims through my agency.

You can pick your nose, but you can’t pick your historical conditions

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. (Marx [1852] 1972, 595)

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. (Marx [1852] 1972, 594)

Squished under the weight of history’s heel

Marx also says, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” (Marx [1852] 1972, 595).

That could be read in light of Durkheimian holism. Society—in the sense of a total system we see from the top down—then starts to sound like it’s a boot on the face of the individual historical actors in a society. Ouch!

Maybe that is a little too pessimistic a view of how social forces determine the conditions in which individual actors operate and exercise agency.

Two approaches to social explanation

• Nb. Although the langue–parole distinction for Saussure illustrates this difference in approaches, there can be holistic perspectives which are diachronic as well as synchronic.
  • For instance, dialectical processes in history are diachronic but still concerned with a holistic perspective.
  • We might say that methodological holism tends to be concerned with synchronic aspects of social life, but that’s not a defining quality.

I know you didn’t just blink at me

Clifford Geertz is a good example of methodological individualism (as is his student, Sherry Ortner). This is the influence of Weberian historical sociology on American cultural anthropology.

Geertz would ask, What’s the difference between a wink and a blink? (Geertz 1973)

• For a structuralist, that’s easy: WINK [one eye closed]; BLINK [two eyes closed]. It’s a single distinctive opposition at the level of form which defines the boundary between two symbolic categories.
• Geertz replies that winking, unlike blinking or an eye twitch, requires thought and effort on the part of the winker. That’s why we notice it. The intention of the winker gives the winker’s action (winking) meaning.

Back to square one?

No. Both methodological individualism and methodological holism are important and neither one can simply be dismissed as wrong or bad:

• They both have pros and cons. They both make assumptions that should be examined skeptically.
• They are tools we can use for different specific problems of explanation. You use the right tool for the job. They aren’t dogmas.
• Even if you are strongly committed to one, you still need to be explain your ideas to people who are strongly committed to the other, and who reject your premises as naive and flawed.

Agency and structure: Coexistence, not conflict

Anthony Giddens takes stock of the two approaches. He argues that one of the central problems of social theory is the relationship of structure to agency (Giddens 1979).

• If we use simple ideas of these two terms, then we assume that every situation is defined by structure versus agency, like oil and water, always opposed.
• Giddens argues that we have to think about structure as something other than constraint and agency as something other than free will.
  • Structure is the synchronic system that underlies experiences in diachronic time, the time in which agents act. It’s like a grammar that makes communication possible.
  • Agency is action, but not all actions have effects, and many have unintended effects. (Even Geertz would agree.)
  • Structure and agency are two sides of the same coin. We need to theorize the duality of structure as the foundation of social existence (Giddens 1979, 5). We can see each side, but what is the coin itself?
• When we redefine structure and agency, and see their relationship as the duality of structure, then we move into new territory. Social explanation is no longer about groups, norms, or even people.

Pierre Bourdieu, master of the run-on sentence

The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce //habitus//, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. (Bourdieu 1990, 53)

To understand something, it helps to know what it is not

Bourdieu’s habitus is not Mauss’s habitus.

Like a good nephew, Mauss’s concept of a habitus is very Durkheimian: A habitus is a social fact.

Specifically, a habitus is a “technique of the body” that one acquires as a norm (Mauss [1934] 1973).

• According to Mauss, men and women have different ways of making a fist and punching (Mauss [1934] 1973, 76). (I have the same questions you have.)
  • A more familiar and persuasive example might be “man-spreading” versus sitting with crossed legs (Dunne 2016; Fitzsimmons 2014).
• American and French nurses’ ways of walking (Mauss [1934] 1973, 72).
• Japanese-Brazilian return migrants to Japan are immediately clocked as “gaijin” (foreigners) by Japanese nationals in public because of the return migrants’ distinctly Brazilian habitus on the Tokyo subway (Tsuda 2003, ix).

Let’s pick the Bourdieusian habitus apart, clause by clause

• [Habitus is produced by]
  • conditionings
    • associated with a particular class of
      • conditions
        • of existence
• [Habitus is]
  • a system
    • of ~ dispositions
      • durable
      • transposable
    • ~ structures
      • structured
      • [predisposed to function as] structuring
• [The “structuring structures” of the habitus are]
  • principles which ~
    • generate practice
    • organize practice
  • representations that ~
    • can be objectively adapted to their outcomes
      • without presupposing
        • a conscious aiming at ends
        • an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them [ends]

References and further reading

“Agency, n.” 2024. In Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1249589150.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. “Structures, Habitus, Practices.” In The Logic of Practice, 52–65. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Dunne, Carey. 2016. “Vintage Subway Etiquette Posters Reveal Manspreading Has Always Been Annoying.” Hyperallergic (blog). August 29, 2016. https://hyperallergic.com/319245/vintage-subway-etiquette-posters-reveal-manspreading-has-always-been-annoying/.

Fitzsimmons, Emma G. 2014. “A Scourge Is Spreading. M.T.A.’s Cure? Dude, Close Your Legs.” The New York Times, December 20, 2014, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/MTA-targets-manspreading-on-new-york-city-subways.html.

Geertz, Clifford. 1973. “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Cultures.” In The Interpretation of Cultures : Selected Essays, 3–32. New York: Basic Books.

Giddens, Anthony. 1979. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

Marx, Karl. (1852) 1972. “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” In The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by Robert C. Tucker, 594–617. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Mauss, Marcel. (1934) 1973. “Techniques of the Body.” Economy and Society 2 (1): 70–88. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147300000003.

Ortner, Sherry B. 1984. “Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (1): 126–66. http://www.jstor.org/stable/178524.

———. 2006. “Power and Projects: Reflections on Agency.” In Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822388456.

Prentice, Rebecca. 2015. “‘Keeping Up with Style’: The Struggle for Skill.” In Thiefing a Chance, 111–42. Factory Work, Illicit Labor, and Neoliberal Subjectivities in Trinidad. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt155jp7p.10.

Tsuda, Takeyuki. 2003. Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press.