MAKING SENSE OF MAKING SENSE 267clarifying the other. Inasmuch as active interpretation is closely linked to agency, this challenge
must be met decisively.
In what follows I will argue that an appropriate way to meet that challenge involves a linked
set of three analytical tasks: The cultural resources on which actors draw when engaging in legiti-
mation struggles must be delineated; the specific histories of those resources, from which their
practical efficacy stems, must be disclosed; and the specific ways that those resources are de-
ployed in a concrete episode must be traced. All three of these tasks need to be accomplished in
such a way that the analyst never loses sight of the fact that she or he is promulgating a theoreti-
cally informed account of an episode, and never simply revealing the world “the way that it really
is.” Doing so requires taking the ideal-typical, or “prosthetic,” character of scholarly accounts
more seriously than other approaches do. I begin with this philosophical consideration before
turning to a more detailed explication of the three analytical tasks and how to carry them out.
AGENCY AND THE DOUBLE HERMENEUTIC
Interpretation, whether it is being performed by the historical actors who are the objects of analy-
sis or by the scholarly researcher carrying out that analysis, “is never a presuppositionless appre-
hending of something presented” to the interpreter (Heidegger 1962 [1927], 191–92). Instead,
interpretation is more of a process of assembling (even if in an unconscious way) extant cultural
resources to form specific patterns.^6 This process of interpretation does not take place inside of
heads, but instead involves the manipulation of intersubjective resources of signification—
resources that we might call “cultural” (Geertz 1973a; Geertz 1980; Wedeen 2002). It is thus
“public” in a conceptual sense, even if the act of interpretation in question is performed away
from the popular gaze—or even in the privacy of one’s own mind, inasmuch as one always uses
publicly available resources to think (Wittgenstein 1953). Thinking and interpreting are irreduc-
ibly conversational activities, oriented toward a shared social context and arising out of the poten-
tialities afforded by that context (Shotter 1993a).
Agency is implicated in these interpretive activities both to the extent that social outcomes are
dependent on particular combinations of cultural resources and to the extent that those combina-
tions are not inevitable (and thus epiphenomenal) products of other factors. Agency, in Giddens’s
formulation, “refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of
doing those things in the first place.... Agency concerns events of which the individual is the
perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct,
have acted differently” (Giddens 1984, 9). The range of possible options at any point in time is a
function of a combination of cultural resources that did not need to be combined in the way that
they factually were. Giddens’s definition thus highlights the connection between agency and a
certain radical indeterminism: Agency means that things could have been different, save for the
impact and implications of certain actions. A meaningful concept of agency is thus opposed to
notions of determinism and inevitability (Abbott 2001, 201–2), and retaining or preserving agency
necessitates a reconceptualization of the explanatory capacity of one’s account of some situation.
When it comes to meaningful social action, agency is creativity and contingency: the creativ-
ity of actors in assembling particular cultural resources in a specific way, and the contingency of
the patterns that are thus produced. This applies equally to the social actors under investigation
and to the scholarly researcher conducting the investigation, although the contexts in which their
interpretations take place are somewhat different. But both kinds of actors are engaged in similar
procedures of assembling extant cultural resources to justify their claims and activities. There is a
“prosthetic” character to this process, in that combinations of resources form