agnosticism
Within a cultural context, agency refers to the way that individuals
behave despite their social and religious context. A person might have
been raised in a strict religious home, but decides not to participate in
religion in adult life. This type of person is acting upon their own per-
sonal agency and contrary to their life history and social conditioning. In
spite of cultural conditioning, a person is free to choose another option
unexpected by other members of one’s family or society. This scenario
indicates that individuals have a role in shaping their personal lives, are
not mere products of the prevailing culture, and that there are limits upon
a culture to get members to conform.
Due to the influence of the poststructural thinker Michel Foucault,
agency is interpreted as a form of resistance against the ideologies of a
culture. In this case, agency is a power exercised, for instance, by an
oppressed person or group against cultural forces. Beyond mere free will
or resistance, agency is a capability to make something happen, as in
rites of passage that transform adolescents into adults, ordinary men into
kings, unmarried to married, and the dead into ancestors.
The transformative potential of agency does not mean that a person
must exercise it. It is possible to let it remain simply potential. The effi-
cacy of an individual’s agency can be measured by the success or failure
of a rite. The exercise of agency through rites suggests that agency is not
simply an individual capability, but is also distributed through a cultural
network that includes social and religious institutions, political leaders,
community, family, local groups, and councils.
In his discussion of agency, Charles Taylor makes a case for it as an
individual mental process by distinguishing between disengaged and
engaged agency. With the former type, the agent fully distinguishes oneself
from the rational and social worlds. Therefore, the subject’s identity is no
longer defined by what lies external to the subject in the world. The engaged
agent is an embodied subject who is engaged in and open to the world. In
other words, the engaged agent acts in the world and on the world.
Embodiment is the subject’s form of agency, and it represents a context for
one’s experience as a context conferring meaning.
Further reading: Davidson (1980); Foucault (1994); Taylor (1985)
AGNOSTICISM
This is a conceptual position related to the negation of the Greek term
gnōstos (meaning to know), implying not to know, for instance, whether