Introduction: reconsidering agency--feminist anthropologies in Asia

The five articles in this Special Issue are introduced by contextualising them broadly within feminist poststructuralist, postcolonial and anthropological approaches. After a brief exploration of methodologies that link ethnography with poetics and historical analysis, a general theoretical critique of modern Western forms of agency, especially liberal notions of autonomous rational choice, is offered. Western philosophy and theory, argues the author, have implications well beyond social formations in the West and she outlines their impacts on the agency of women in Asian societies. While cautioning against the pitfalls of both under and overvaluing agency, the author then offers a reconsideration of its analytical utility. Agency needs to address the gaps between everyday reflection and practices and hegemonic discourses or symbolic structures. In this gap, where women who fall outside the parameters of dominant notions of womanhood are considered 'unstable', both resistance and constraint are possible. Dominant discourses certainly have durable effects but their tools and symbols have been reinscribed to produce agency in hybrid forms. Agency is thus thought to arise from within existing societal discourses and symbolic structures rather than in opposition to them. In this process multiple positionings for women, all of which are performative, are created. These reconsiderations of agency are mirrored in the articles which follow. Agency in its modern forms is deemed inadequate by these authors to explain the agency of women in Asia. Rather than proposing a hierarchy of agency in its significant and insignificant forms, the authors in this Issue provide much needed accounts of socially and culturally situated agency, significant in both their breadth and depth.
Although anthropology and the social sciences in general seem to be good at theorising cultural reproduction, that is the domination of structure over agency, we are less able to explain [...]