Structure vs Agency Debate (by L. Sikstrom)

“If an elder asks you to wash their clothes, just dip them in water” - Youth explaining refusal to me in Malawi with a Tumbuka proverb

 "I hear this word "nkhongono" all of the time. Someone told me it means 'power' (or strength, or life force or energy) but I don't think I fully understand, can you explain?" - Laura to a former team member in Malawi.

"Nkhongono! Yes! Well, here is an example. Let's say my father was the Chief in my village.  So, when my father dies, I tell the whole village 'no, this is now the path that we must walk to the cemetary, not the one that we used when my father was alive. That, Laura, is 'nkhongono.'"

The Structures vs. Agency Tension:

In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour. Structures refers to recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. Agency is sometimes defined as the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own “free” choices. 

The tension between structures and agency is central to the study of human actions and well-being in anthropology more generally (see Table 1 for a very ad hoc comparison of all the concepts in this space). When I teach these concepts in introductory medical anthropology courses I often use Paul Farmer’s case study of Acephie and Chou Chou to talk about what structures are (see Figure 1 – I’ll go over the examples on Friday).

As Farmer states:

“[S]uffering is ‘structured’ by historically given (and often economically driven) processes and forces that conspire – whether through routine, ritual or… the hard surfaces of life – to constrain agency.”

                        - Farmer, p. 40.

Instead of reading the whole thing, here are some key points to remember about “structures”:

1. Health inequities are structured (meaning disease presentations are rarely random or ‘natural’ but structured by a range of social, political, economic and historical factors – usually called ‘embodied inequlities’);
2. Anthropologists aren’t huge fans of the ‘social determinants of health’ (although their useful for cross-disciplinary dialogue);
3. Structures are often invisible, taken for granted, assumed to be natural, normal or even ‘good’;
4. Structures include: sociodemographic features, policies, history, gender, racial capitalism and so on.
5. Structures constrain agency (more on agency below);
6. “Culture” is often framed as a structure (e.g., the idea of culture as a prison that determines human actions); however, anthropologists have a long and complicated history with the notion of ‘culture.’ But – few would define culture as a ‘structure’ but rather say it’s a structure and something that shapes/constrains agency.
   1. For example: ““ The question is why knowing about “the culture” of the region, in particular why knowing about the religious beliefs and treatment of women, was more urgent than exploring the development of a repressive regimes in the region and the US roles in this history. Such cultural framing, it seemed to me, prevented the serious exploration of the roots of human suffering… Instead of political and historical explanations, experts were being asked to give cultural-religious ones.” (p. 784). Abu-Lughod “Do Muslim women really need saving?”

Anthropology and Systemic Inequalities:

The notion of “structural violence” has had a huge impact outside of anthropology. This is partially because Farmer (also a physician) wrote a shortened version of the original article for the Lancet. This article was/is assigned to medical students (and maybe still is?) It is an incredibly useful concept for helping us think about all these layers (like an onion) that envelope an individual and shape their choices. However – even at the time – the concept faced a lot of criticism. I usually assign the original article and urge students to read the responses (now more than 20 years old). I’ll sum up the main criticisms here:

Criticisms of Structural Violence:

1. Too linear, deterministic
   1. “It’s capitalism!”
   2. “It’s racism!”
   3. “It’s neoliberalism!”
   4. “It’s colonialism”
2. Too much of a ‘black box’
   1. What about intersectionality?
   2. Gender, race (Farmer’s Acepphie and ChouChou piece is a response to this criticism)
3. Does not explain power and privilege and how inequities are sustained
   1. Need to “study up”
   2. Explore how victims become victimizers
   3. How people participate in their own oppression
   4. How does the system build and rebuild itself, neutralizing and absorbing opposition and reform? - Kirmayer on Farmer, p. 321
      1. Social reproduction: inequalities become naturalized via ‘common sense’ or hegemonic ideas about race, the body, gender, work, personhood, health and so on.
      2. By neutralizing or engulfing resistance (eg. Make people look backward, irrational, uncivilized, ignorant).
4. Diffuses responsibility
   1. Who ultimately is accountable for ‘structural violence’
5. Conflates different kinds of violence that need to be differentiated
   1. 1. Gender violence, genocide, organ trafficking, military invasion: are these really the same thing?
      2. Need to address violence as a continuum

Enter Agency

To understand human actions, social scientists often use the word: “agency”. What does agency mean?

Agency is understood as the capacity to realize one’s own interests against the weight of custom, male authority, class, the state, religion or other obstacles, often referred to as ‘structures’.

Like freedom, but more accurately: freedom for meaningful action and to make one’s own choices, within the pragmatic constraints (structures) of society.

Empirically, it is unclear to what extent human actions are constrained by the structures that surround them. Capacities are shaped by numerous factors (from genetics, eg., Acephie’s beauty to gender norms, eg., men in Malawi are not responsible for fire making). Furthermore, going back to Abu-Lughod:

“What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, always raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities?” (786)

This means that “one’s own interests” must always be defined in context (there is no ‘objective’ measure). This plays out in medicine in a number of ways. How and why individuals might refuse medical care or behave in ways that appear (at least on the surface) to be irrational, backwards or ill-informed. Often it is assumed that this is ‘norm based action’ (eg., culture as a prison model, belief as backwards, humans as rational actors) but there has been a lot of work to unpack these dichotomies.

Interpreting Human Agency, Motivation and Intentionality

Most anthropologists are not that interested in people’s interior lives (e.g., unconscious or conscious intentions). This is largely due to methodological constraints. Via participant observation we are mostly focused on observable human actions and speech in the everyday. We do, however, interpret those actions and expressed thoughts and feelings. We may complete these interpretations with our interlocutors (e.g., why do you think that is?)  However, interpretations do not always align with how the individuals involved understand the intent or the motivation behind their actions. So, for example, the notion of negative agency (and it’s corollaries of encompassed agency).

“The refusal to cooperate with others projects. The refusal to be encompassed.” (Wardlow, p. 14)

Wardlow (my PhD advisor) has written extensively about gendered agency and highlights that for people with more contraints (e.g., women) an important source of ‘power’ (agency) is to refuse to cooperate with other people’s plans for them, especially to refuse access to their bodies to produce new kin (babies). The everyday forms of this refusal include:

• Sullenness
• Refusal to garden
• Refusal to have sex
• Refusing to do laundry or fetch things
• Refusal to stay in marriage

Some acts of refusal are self-destructive (e.g., autoviolence, increase risk of getting HIV and so on). It is also NOT an absence of power/agency, but acts that must be seen as “effects of power” (Ortner in Wardlow, p. 15). In other words, people don't lack 'power' (or agency) but the capacity to express it is shaped by these structures that surround us. That means their everyday forms are gendered, racialized and so on., and that they also vary from place to place (e.g., what people refuse to participate in is highly contextual). 

Encompassed Agency in Canada

When I talk about this in Canada I like to use this example from a mom's group in East Toronto.  Thousands of east end moms cheered on this other mom for refusing to pick up her husbands dirty sock - how long we wondered would it take him to notice it was there? The infamous "sockgate" lasted 86 days... What does the refusal to comply mean? 

What does this mean for understanding violence and aggression? 

For example, when is aggression framed as 'self-harm' and when it is framed as violence or aggression directed at others? It is worth reading through the DASA assessment attached below through the lense of 'agency.'  For example, is it an 'unwillingness to follow directions?' Or an unwillingness to cooperate with the plans others have for you? How are these acts gendered? Racialized? Generated between human beings? (e.g., Juveria's work on stable internal characteristics vs., 'situational' causes).

DASA 7 Attributes:

• Irritability
• Impulsivity
• Unwillingness to follow directions
• Sensitivity to perceived provocation
• Refusal to follow
• Easily angered when requests are denied
• Negative attitudes
• Verbal threats

Figure 1 Structural Violence in Haiti