Saba Mahmood spent years with an all-women’s movement inside a mosque in Egypt — the first of its kind in the country’s history. A feminist scholar might be tempted to celebrate that. Mahmood says you shouldn’t, because the movement exists to reinforce pious norms. Her conclusion is that “the concept of agency should be delinked from the goals of progressive politics,” and that tethering it to them has produced “the incarceration of the notion of agency within the trope of resistance.” For The History of Anthropological Thought, after Necropolitics, we began the section “On Agency” with three readings in Anthropological Theory for the Twenty-First Century. (Commissions earned) For broader context see the Power Analysis hub.
- Saba Mahmood, “The Subject of Freedom” (2005)
- Shalini Shankar, “Speaking like a Model Minority: ‘FOB’ Styles, Gender, and Racial Meanings among Desi Teens in Silicon Valley” (2008)
- Victoria Redclift, “Abjects or Agents? Camps, Contests, and the Creation of ‘Political Space'” (2013)
Key Concepts
- Ask a room to study “the anthropology of agency” and the first response is the same as it is for the state: which agency? Twenty years ago students heard the phrase and thought of the Social Security Agency.
- Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture was supposed to establish that learned, dynamic behavior matters more than biological determinism — but as anthropology sought scientific standing, attention drifted toward pattern and structure.
- Structural functionalism (Radcliffe-Brown, Malinowski) and structuralism (Lévi-Strauss) both emphasized how structures determine lives; Pierre Bourdieu tried to restore action that nonetheless reproduces the system.
- Victoria Redclift challenges the scholarly habit of reducing stateless people to “abject bare life, human superfluity” with no agency whatever.
- In the actual lived spaces of statelessness, people move out of camps, gain mobility, sometimes obtain citizenship cards, and act politically. They are not helpless pawns.
- Shalini Shankar’s desi teens in Silicon Valley reclaim “fresh off the boat” as an in-group marker — “desi-accented English,” which is a strategy rather than an accent.
- They deploy Spanish to mock faculty who cannot tell them apart from Latinos (370), and take hip-hop vocabulary “without any political or social interest in Black people.”
- Saba Mahmood’s intervention: “Agential capacity is not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms” (365). Agency can be conservative.
Which Agency?
The same joke that greets the anthropology of the state greets this one. Say we are going to do anthropology and agency, and the first thought is: which agency are we doing?
Twenty years ago, saying “agency” in a classroom produced the Social Security Agency. Now the word turns up in popular culture, meaning a person’s ability to act in the world. It is not obvious how that happened, but anthropology was working the concept over long before it went mainstream.
The Structure-Agency Debate
This entered anthropology through a long-running argument between structure and agency, which people got quite worked up about.
Go back to what early anthropologists said about culture. Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture was, as I keep insisting, supposed to be the moment where we recognized that learned behavior — the dynamic process by which we learn and change — matters more than biological determinism, or the determinism attached to sex.
But as the discipline developed, people grew more and more interested in the patterns themselves, in the structuring of culture. That interest was always there; it grew as anthropology tried to become more scientific and secure its place in the academy rather than positioning itself against what was happening in society.
So we got structural functionalism, associated with Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski in the UK, and structuralism, associated mainly with Lévi-Strauss. Very different projects, but both describing how patterns and structures determine people’s lives. The dynamism got lost.
Bourdieu’s work was an attempt to bring it back: people act in the world, they are not determined, and yet their actions reproduce the system. Which leaves the question. How much agency do people have — how much capacity to make change or simply to do what they want — and how much are they determined by social structure, by the powers that be, by culture? For Bourdieu at length, see Anthropology of State Power.
Victoria Redclift: Abjects or Agents?
Redclift’s article brings the question to the fore through statelessness and citizenship, and the density of her citations is itself a signal — there is a whole scholarly production about people in this condition.
As she puts it, these “‘dehumanized individuals’ without any political system to offer them protection have been the subject of a growing body of scholarship and increasing academic concern.” People without citizenship, in camps, across a border, applying for political asylum. People with no state.
Her point is that most of those portrayals describe a regime of statelessness in which people are reduced to “abject bare life, human superfluity” — that is, to no agency at all. And it is tempting to think about people that way, since they have no citizenship and no state and appear unable to do anything.
What Redclift examines instead is the actual lived spaces of statelessness. What is happening in these camps, according to firsthand accounts? It is not good. It is pretty bare. But some people move out of the camps and acquire some form of mobility. Some obtain citizenship cards. Education and schooling remain a serious problem.
Her conclusion is that camp residents are not completely subjugated into having no agency. They have some mobility, some movement, and they are influential actors in their own way — not helpless pawns. Portrayals of stateless people as simply helpless victims will need adjusting, and statelessness is going to be an enormous issue that we hear about more and more.
Shalini Shankar: FOB Style in Silicon Valley
Shankar’s subject is identity-making among desi teens in Silicon Valley. She frames it as a clash of language ideologies: “Ideologies of multilingualism that prevail in South Asia travel with their speakers to an increasingly monolingual California.” And: “such an ideological clash is managed differently by upwardly mobile, well-educated desis and by middle-class families who have prospered from the tech boom but remain in assembly-line jobs.” Her teens come from the second group — in the industry, but not its upper reaches.
They adopt what she calls FOB style, which is immediately interesting because “fresh off the boat” is ordinarily an insult. These are second- and even third-generation teens taking the term for in-group conversation and self-marking.
The style combines Punjabi with California slang and rap expressions — and, unexpectedly, Spanish. At one point (370) they say “No hablo inglés” to each other, not to any Spanish speaker, and everyone laughs. Shankar: “They occasionally speak Spanish in a school environment where they are routinely mistaken for Latinos. They use Spanish as a way to mock faculty who cannot easily differentiate between them and Latinos.” They do not otherwise speak much Spanish, and not with Mexican Americans. The Spanish is aimed at people who cannot tell them apart.
She is direct about the hip-hop borrowing too: “FOB styles incorporate lexical elements from hip-hop without any political or social interest in Black people.” This is an entirely in-group designation. It is not an attempt to cross over, assimilate, or blend.
Shankar names the variety “desi-accented English,” or Dae, through which teens index insider humor. It is not an accent. It is a way of distinguishing themselves from the people around them and knowing who they are — language used to shape how one is perceived, and to shape racial meanings within a diasporic community. In the school, it also reads as acting contrary to the model minority stereotype.
Saba Mahmood: Agency Is Not Resistance
Mahmood begins from how the concept is ordinarily used: as resistance to structure. “Agency, in this form of analysis, is understood as the capacity to realize one’s own interests against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles.” Structure has been opposed to agency from the start, so saying someone has agency means they can do what they want against obstacles.
Then the case. Mahmood studied a women’s Islamist movement in Egypt — an all-women movement inside a mosque, the first in the country’s history. As a feminist you might get excited about that. She says you shouldn’t, because it is an all-women’s movement organized to reinforce pious norms of the Islamic religion.
Which is somewhat like Bourdieu’s argument but more potent. When people exercise agency they are not necessarily resisting. Agency can be a conservative or normative force. “Agential capacity is not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms” (365).
She is careful about her own scope: “I am not interested in offering a theory of agency.” Her interest is in how the concept has been harnessed to movements and ideas inside the academy in ways that prevent us from seeing what is actually going on.
Hence the intervention: “the concept of agency should be delinked from the goals of progressive politics. A tethering that has often led to the incarceration of the notion of agency within the trope of resistance against oppressive and dominating operations of power.”
The incarceration of the notion of agency. What a phrase.
Look at how people exercise agency, she is saying — but do not assume it belongs to progressive politics.
On Radicalizing Students
This reading landed at a particular moment, when a certain amount of commentary was blaming professors for radicalizing students during campus protests.
So: has any of this been radicalizing? Anyone who has been in a classroom recently knows that students rarely do anything I tell them to do, which makes the mechanism hard to picture.
And consider what we actually read. Saba Mahmood, a feminist, arguing that the concept of agency must be delinked from the goals of progressive politics. Whatever that is, it is close to the opposite of what the accusation imagines. It is also the harder piece of thinking.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the structure-agency debate?
It asks how much of what people do is determined by social structure and how much they act on their own. Anthropology started from Benedict’s emphasis on dynamism and learned behavior, then drifted toward structural functionalism and structuralism, which foreground how patterns determine lives. Bourdieu’s work tried to hold both: people genuinely act, and their actions reproduce the system anyway.
What does Saba Mahmood mean by delinking agency from progressive politics?
That agency has been defined as resistance to power, so scholars only recognize it when they approve of its direction. Mahmood’s women’s mosque movement in Egypt exercises considerable agency in order to reinforce religious norms. Her claim is that “agential capacity is not only in those acts that resist norms but also in the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms” (365), and that tying the concept to progressive goals has meant “the incarceration of the notion of agency within the trope of resistance.”
Can agency be conservative?
Yes — that is the point. If agency is only visible when it opposes existing norms, then everyone who acts deliberately to sustain a tradition disappears from the analysis, or gets described as a dupe. Mahmood’s argument is that this makes the concept useless for seeing what people are actually doing.
Do stateless people have agency?
Victoria Redclift argues yes, against a scholarly literature that reduces them to “abject bare life.” Conditions in camps are bare. But people move out, obtain mobility and sometimes citizenship documents, and act politically. Treating them as helpless victims misdescribes them, and statelessness is a growing rather than shrinking condition.
What is FOB style?
Shalini Shankar’s term for a linguistic style among desi teens in Silicon Valley who reclaim “fresh off the boat” — ordinarily an insult — as an in-group marker. It mixes Punjabi, California slang, hip-hop vocabulary, and strategic Spanish. She calls it “desi-accented English,” and it is a deliberate strategy for marking insider status rather than an accent.
Course Navigation
This material was for The History of Anthropological Thought 2024, opening the section “On Agency” after Necropolitics. The discussion continues with “The Anthropology of Refusal.”
Related: Anthropology of State Power (Bourdieu, Verdery, Aretxaga) | Habitus and Doxa (Bourdieu on structure and practice) | Power Analysis Hub