ABSTRACT
In this way, Donald Hall situates agency at the heart of his book-length discussion of subjectivity. He traces a line of thought ranging from the classical period (e.g. Plato) to the enlightenment era (Descartes, Kant, Locke) to the present (Taylor, 1989) in which issues around the autonomy of rational subjects and their ability to strive for perfection, among other things, have been the focus of discussion. However, it is agency as part of a more general turn to identity in the social sciences in recent years which is the focus of this chapter. My aim is to think with the reader about issues around poststructuralist approaches to identity and current anthropological and sociological thought about agency, with a view to elaborating a clear way to understand identity work in context in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. I fi rst very briefl y discuss a poststructuralist approach to identity, which I see as prevalent in the social sciences today. I then consider how agency has been conceptualised in recent years, focussing specifi cally on recent attempts by two theorists-Sherry Ortner (1989, 2005, 2006) and Margaret Archer (2007)—to reconcile tensions at the crossroads of structure and agency. These background discussions lead to a tentative outline of parameters shaping agency as emergent in social practices, which I then apply a study by Bashir-Ali (2006) to see what we can glean beyond what the original author gleaned in her analysis.
