Normativity, agency, and life

There is an immense philosophical literature dealing with the notions of normativity and agency, as well as a sizeable and rapidly growing scientific literature on the topic of autonomous agents. However, there has been very little cross-fertilization between these two literatures. As a result, the philosophical literature tends to assume a somewhat outdated mechanistic image of living things, resulting in a quasi-dualistic picture in which only human beings, or the higher animals, can be normative agents properly speaking. From this perspective, the project of 'naturalizing normativity' becomes almost a contradiction in terms. At the same time, the scientific literature tends to misuse 'normativity,' 'agency,' and related terms, assuming that it is meaningful to ascribe these concepts to 'autonomous agents' conceived of as physical systems whose behavior is to be explained in terms of ordinary physical law. From this perspective, the true depth of the difficulty involved in understanding what makes living systems distinctive qua physical systems becomes occluded. In this essay, I begin the attempt to remedy this situation. After some preliminary discussion of terminology and situating of my project within the contemporary philosophical landscape, I make a distinction between two different aspects of the project of naturalizing normativity: (1) the 'Scope Problem,' which consists in saying how widely in nature our concept of normative agency may properly be applied; and (2) the 'Ground Problem,' which consists in rationalizing the phenomenon of normative agency in terms of the rest of our knowledge of nature. Then, in the remainder of this paper, I argue that the Scope Problem ought to be resolved in favor of attributing normative agency, in the proper sense of those words, to living things as such. The Ground Problem will be discussed in a companion paper at a later time.     

The poetics of wisdom divination: renewing the moral imagination

This article makes a critical contribution to interpretive anthropology by recovering its interest in the moral imagination, while linking this to the poetics of wisdom divination, primarily among Tswapong of Botswana and more widely across a vast part of Southern Africa. This mode of divination appeals to imaginative moral reflection and ethical deliberation along with practical wisdom in the quest for well‐being. The esoteric oral literature in wisdom divination is rich in cross‐cultural understandings, transmitted over considerable barriers, and re‐created over centuries. Its evocative praise poetry, having no known author, is archived in the memories of experts, the diviners, and is recited and interpreted selectively during diagnostic séances. Yet anthropologists and literary scholars have not paid serious attention to the oral poetry and its remarkable wide‐ranging archive. Against that, this article documents the acrobatic stylistics of the divinatory poetry and shows how it appeals artfully for reflexivity, for heightened consciousness, and for unmasking the hidden in everyday life. The main analysis carries forward an anthropology of ethics that overcomes the usual division of labour between the study of ethics and aesthetics.     

Finding meaning in first episode psychosis: experience, agency, and the cultural repertoire

The article examines individuals' attempts to generate meaning following their experiences with psychosis. The inquiry is based on a person-centered ethnographic study of a Danish mental health community program for early intervention in schizophrenia and involves longitudinal interviews with 15 of its participants. The article takes an existential anthropological perspective emphasizing agency and cultural phenomenology to investigate how individuals draw on resources from the cultural repertoire to make sense of personally disturbing experiences during their psychosis. It is suggested that the concept of "system of explanation" has advantages over, for example, "illness narrative" and "explanatory model" when demonstrating how some individuals engage in the creative analytic and theory-building work of bricolage, selecting, adding, and combining various systems of explanation. Delusions are equally derived from the cultural repertoire but are constructed as dogmatic explanations that are idiosyncratic to the individual who holds them.     

Women,warfare, and the life of agency: Papua New Guinea and beyond

‘Agency’ entered anthropological discourse as a key word from the 1970s in renewed social‐philosophical theorizations (e.g. ‘structure and agency’) as major deterministic theories (e.g. Marxism, structuralism) became less persuasive. It came to play an increasing role in ethnography. Though agency, too, has been partly replaced in some of its earlier semantic range, it has been more fully retained in some areas of usage than others, especially in analyses of subordination in the face of power. This article considers several different conceptualizations of agency. Ethnographically, it focuses on women's differing forms of action in two episodes of warfare in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. In contrasting these, the article concurs with critiques of approaches to ‘agency’ that turn it into a (liberatory) abstraction, and proposes a view of agency as lived relation of intervention and involvement in social action, inherently linked to values and constraints. The combination may be, but is not always, liberatory. The article considers the life and (partial) expiry of agency as a term of social science art.     

On emergence, agency, and organization

Ultimately we will only understand biological agency when we have developed a theory of the organization of biological processes, and science is still a long way from attaining that goal. It may be possible nonetheless to develop a list of necessary conditions for the emergence of minimal biological agency. The authors offer a model of molecular autonomous agents which meets the five minimal physical conditions that are necessary (and, we believe, conjointly sufficient) for applying agential language in biology: autocatalytic reproduction; work cycles; boundaries for reproducing individuals; self-propagating work and constraint construction; and choice and action that have evolved to respond to food or poison. When combined with the arguments from preadaptation and multiple realizability, the existence of these agents is sufficient to establish ontological emergence as against what one might call Weinbergian reductionism. Minimal biological agents are emphatically not conscious agents, and accepting their existence does not commit one to any robust theory of human agency. Nor is there anything mystical, dualistic, or non-empirical about the emergence of agency in the biosphere. Hence the emergence of molecular autonomous agents, and indeed ontological emergence in general, is not a negation of or limitation on careful biological study but simply one of its implications.     

Procreation,Personhood and ethnic difference in Highland Bolivia

Academic debates on the difference between ‘indians’ and ‘non‐indians’ in highland Latin America typically revolve around issues of race, ethnicity and class understood from an etic perspective. Although there may be a consensus as to where the boundary between one status and the other lies, how this boundary is understood varies dramatically between scholars, as well as between actors on each side of the boundary. This paper examines the identity of those denominated ‘indian’ from an emic perspective. It argues that ‘race’, ‘ethnicity'and ‘class’ are insufficient in themselves to explain this level of social difference. At the root of the difference between jaqi (indians) and q'ara (non‐indians) are understandings of personhood. An examination of procreation beliefs and understandings of personhood sheds light on how identity is understood. The dyads indian/non‐indian and jaqi/q'ara are not, of course, generated independently of each other and this paper also examines how the one articulates with the other. Although the category ‘indian’ is one imposed historically from outside, this does not preclude people's ability to generate a different understanding of that category from within.     

Scooping, raking, beckoning luck: luck, agency and the interdependence of people and things in Japan

This article focuses on the circulation and consumption of Japanese commodities invested with an informal, domestic form of spirituality, translated as 'luck'. Tambiah has argued that the dissemination of spiritual power objectified in Thai Buddhist amulets reflects the 'differential power distribution' and 'social control' vested in an hierarchically ordered lay society. My Japanese case study suggests that commodification of religious forms enables a more democratic diffusion of spirituality. Good luck charms are neither sacred nor secular; they challenge the supposed divide between the aesthetic value and utility of objects. They are part of extended networks of human and non-human agents, but through their various trajectories they also retain an independent agency rooted in their material properties.     

Before your very eyes: illness, agency, and the management of Tourette Syndrome

In this article, I examine the ways that people with Tourette Syndrome (TS) manage the motor and vocal tics characteristic of this neurological disorder. To mitigate the powerful stigmas associated with TS, individuals must either remove tics from public view or strive to recast the way that they are perceived. Drawing on ethnographic research with TS sufferers in Indiana, I elaborate three strategies by which this is done, strategies referred to here as displacement, misattribution, and contextualization. These processes strongly affect both the symptoms themselves and the subjective experience of the illness. They also affect the perception of TS in the larger culture, associating the disease with florid symptoms like cursing--symptoms that, although not at all typical of TS, are the ones most resistant to these kinds of management. These patterns highlight how individual agency may actively shape the cultural construction of illness.     

Collective behavior in relation with changing environments: Dynamics,modularity, and agency

Collective behavior operates without central control, using local interactions among participants to adjust to changing conditions. Many natural systems operate collectively, and by specifying what objectives are met by the system, the idea of agency helps to describe how collective behavior is embedded in the conditions it deals with. Ant colonies function collectively, and the enormous diversity of more than 15K species of ants, in different habitats, provides opportunities to look for general ecological patterns in how collective behavior operates. The foraging behavior of harvester ants in the desert regulates activity to manage water loss, while the trail networks of turtle ants in the canopy tropical forest respond to rapidly changing resources and vegetation. These examples illustrate some broad correspondences in natural systems between the dynamics of collective behavior and the dynamics of the surroundings. To outline how interactions among participants, acting in relation with changing surroundings, achieve collective outcomes, I focus on three aspects of collective behavior: the rate at which interactions adjust to conditions, the feedback regime that stimulates and inhibits activity, and the modularity of the network of interactions. To characterize the dynamics of the surroundings, I consider gradients in stability, energy flow, and the distribution of resources and demands. I then propose some hypotheses that link how collective behavior operates with changing environments.     

The Anthropocene narrative and Amerindian lifeworlds: anthropos,agency, and personhood

Based on the observation that the Anthropocene narrative signifies a departure from the Cartesian nature/culture division dominant within modernist science, this article explores notions of personhood and agency among Amerindian peoples in the Amazon, the Andes, and Mesoamerica in comparison to the corresponding notions in modernist discourses. We discuss the differences in conceptualizations in relation to diverging understandings of climate change and the Anthropocene, focusing on perspectives on agentivity both within our respective ethnographical fields and in modernist social sciences. This leads us to stress the significance of new materialists’ disregard for intentionality in relation to agency and the consequences this neglect has for understanding animist perspectives. We examine the different views in relation to their effects on morality and to perceived forms of accountability. In accordance, the modernist ‘global we’, prominent in the Anthropocene debate stressing the role of humanity as a species, is contrasted with what we call a ‘universal we’, which includes both human and other-than-human persons, in conformance with Amerindian animist perspectives on the world. This approach to the issue does not only mean that we challenge the obvious iniquity in blaming all of humanity for climate change but also that we point to the coloniality of reality implicit in the Anthropocene narrative.