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Here class is very important, because the degree of agency kinds and quality of the choices you have depends on the amount of power you have your position in society as well as your awareness.
Anthropologist Eric Wolf distinguished three different kinds of power basic ways of getting what you want and getting people to do what you want them to do : the power to set setting up how the system works, the power to move around changing position within that system, and the personal power to get other people to do what you want them to do working the magic of your personality on people . It’s the laws and accepted practices that set up how the system works, and the ruling class pretty much controls that. We say pretty much because it’s a very complex system of negotiation back and forth that depends on a lot of different details. For instance, environmentalists, organized labor or the civil rights movement may be sufficiently organized and raise enough money to have a little say in some of the rules. The managerial middle class which we’re going to talk about later in this chapter have power to can move around within the system. The ruling class hires some of the working class to manage the system and buys their loyalty with perks and privileges. They live in big fancy houses, drive fancy new cars and send their kids to the best colleges. Then there’s the power to how you personally get others to do what you want. This may come from wearing high heeled shoes and stockings or a necktie, it may come from a friendly smile or it may come from a gun. But consider the differences in power of between the mugger with a gun in his hand and the guy he’s mugging. The mugger can boss around the mugee for a little while and take his money, but in the long run, the mugee is going to be the guy that has something to do with the police department budget or sits on a parole board.
To understand agency, though, we need to add another kind of power: the power of understand relationships with other people. You may have heard the saying, “it’s not what you know but who you know.” So, even if it doesn’t seem like you may not have much power to are someone who can set the rules for the system or maneuver in the system, you may be able to organize people to apply pressure to those who do—like environmentalists, organized labor or the civil rights movement. We can call this the power of social relations or the power or organizing the strength of social ties, or solidarity . Often that’s the only kind of power way working people have to get what they need .
We’re still on the topic of agency here. Anthropologists always have to strive to get out of our own cultures to see things from the outside. We have to get out of our own cultural codes, our own emic system, our own ways of seeing things. Americans are creatures of a consumer oriented economy. When the economy collapsed in the late 1920s and again late in 2008 a solution was to get money into the hands of people so they could spend it. That would create demand for goods that would in turn create jobs that would in turn create income and thus solve the problem. Consumers make choices. That is, consumers have agency when looked at from the outside of the relationship they have with sellers . You can buy this soap or that one. They may be identical chemically, but you have to feel that there is some difference that makes one preferable. This is the underlying assumption of the religion/discipline of economics—that people make choices. It’s even part of our law—people who cannot make choices are not responsible for their actions and thus can’t be guilty of committing crimes. So, for instance, if German prison guards during Nazi times argued at the Nuremburg trials after the war that they were just obeying orders, they had no agency of their own and thus could not be guilty of any crimes. But if they did have choices to make, and went they did go along with their orders, . T hey could not avoid the fact that they did have agency and thus were responsible for their actions and could be guilty of crimes. So the idea that people have choices gets deeply coded into our culture as an assumption and sometimes it’s difficult to see beyond it.
So if this is a cultural prison, in an attempt let’s try
to break out of it, let’s suppose that nobody has any agency at all, that the whole idea is just a part of our culture and that to project it onto anyone else is simple ethnocentrism. If people have no choices, how do we explain what they do? Some people talk as though they thought people were puppets of some kind. The anthropologist Alfred Krober (for fantasy and sf readers, the father of Ursula K. Le Guin) talked a lot about the superorganic. He was trying to get

Durrenburger: Anthropology Unbound, 2 nd
ed. Draft w/ emendations across the idea of all the things about us that aren’t biological. Some things we do because of our biological nature. The rest is “superorganic,” or cultural. But that started to sound like some kind of octopus in the sky with tentacles coming down and jerking us all around or like we were just puppets entirely controlled by someone, or something, else . Cultures evolved, but somehow there were no people in the system. Orthodox Marxists (Marxists come in varieties just as Christians, Jews, and Moslems do) are likely to talk about structural determination. There’s a great economic structure that determines how we act. Or as a friend of Paul’s once put it, “you’re a node in the mode,” meaning a point in a mode of production. And that determines what you think and do. Still, no people.
Some anthropologists thought economists had basically the right idea about choices but just hadn’t done the ethnography, so they talked about decision making. They would figure out all the possibilities a person might face, outline those as a system of related choices and how people could work through them to decide what to actually do at the end of it. This approach saw people as more or less like computers who would take the world as input and compute alternatives, compare them with goals, and decide which was best, and then do that. Then the anthropologists felt they had explained the behavior. But this is so mechanical that it didn’t leave any more room for the complexities of choice than a computer would have.
And it did not leave any room for the fact that other people are not trees or cows or cars, but people just like us, with their own choices which we cannot make for them, but with whom we have to live and interact.
These are different deterministic systems. A deterministic system is one whose inputs determine the outputs. A deterministic game is one whose outcome depends only on who starts first—like tic tac toe.
There’s a movie called War Game in which a Defense Department computer goes whack-o and thinks the
Russians are attacking the U.S. with missiles (it was a cold-war nightmare). The computer starts to mobilize the whole U.S. for defense and it’s about ready to nuke the whole world when a couple of kids who are the heroes get the computer to play tic tac toe with them. The computer figures out very fast by trying all alternatives that it’s a deterministic game. Then it draws the relevant conclusion, “The only way to win is not to play.” And it quits fooling around with the Russians ’
and Americans
’ missiles
.
So we’re not just somehow “enacting our cultures,” and we’re not determined by our places in our economic systems or even the various alternatives in front of us. But how to we know this isn’t just a trick of our own culture, the power of our emic system over reality?
This is a little like the question of how do you know that you’re not making up everything you experience. Philosophers deal with this by showing that if you take the line of thought just a little way out, you can see that it can’t possibly be so. You can reduce it to an absurdity. So suppose the world is just a function of my imagination. I see you in my world. You are a creature like me. We can even more or less understand each other. Therefore, if you are like me, you might be imagining me. But I know that
I’m the one in the center here. But if you’re like me, you’re also in the center. The only way out of the absurdity is to admit that we’re both in a real world and that neither of us is imagining it. Whew!
Welcome to the real world! The way you check your own perceptions is by talking to other people. As long as they agree with you, you’re okay, you’re in touch with some kind of reality. Notice that reality depends on your willingness to suppose that other people are the same as you, that you’re willing to talk to them and believe what they tell you. Thus it depends on other people. So does anything you think you know about the world, because you only know it as a member of that community, that group of people.
That’s what anthropologists mean by culture. And that’s what we mean when we say that people of different cultures live in different worlds. So the idea here is that we actively built our cultures by exploring the world with each other. Notice, though, that you cannot exist as an individual; you only exist as a human being with culture as part of a group.

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Here, we’re going to borrow something from the economists. They assume that if everyone does what is in their own interests it serves the interests of everyone. So markets are the solution to all problems. In
Chapter 16, we’re going to see how well this worked out recently in Iceland. But for now, suppose the police nab you and your friend and slap you in jail because they think you robbed a bank. Whether or not you really did it doesn’t matter, but they have no evidence on you. You and your pal were just hanging around in ski masks and looked like you might be bank robbers. The Attorney General is on the cops because they haven’t been getting many convictions and she wants to appear to be hard on crime because an election is coming up. So the cops put you in separate cells. Now a cop comes to you and says that if you rat out your friend, you’ll go free and, if your friend says nothing, she’ll get ten years in jail. On the other hand, if she rats you out too, you both get five years in jail. But if neither one of you rats on the other, you both get six months. That’ll teach you to go around looking suspicious!
What do you do? Both of you want to go free, and who gives a damn about a friend, right? Easy come, easy go. So do what’s in your own best interest and devil take your friend. So both of you rat on the other.
So you both act in your own interests with no concern for the other and you both get a rotten deal, five years in stir. That’ll teach you to be a snitch. Wait a minute! You both acted in your best interest, but it wasn’t the best outcome. What happened here? That’s why some economists started looking into game theory where they could explore such issues. And they knew about what they called the tragedy of the commons which is similar. You and I own use a pasture together, in common. I put a sheep on it. You see that and put your own sheep on it so you can use some of the grass before mine eats it all. I see that and I might as well put a whole herd of sheep on it. You see that and do the same and before long there’s no grass for anyone. Again, we just have to get private property in here to solve this tragedy.
But guess what? People don’t act that way. A lot of ethnographic work shows that people figure out ways to manage their resources whether they be pasture, water or fish in the sea. Just because something is a problem for economists doesn’t mean it is for people. Economists have built up a whole line of reasoning on this prisoners’ dilemma but if you set this up as a real experiment instead of a thought experiment, people won’t rat each other out and will both take the least sentence, and get the best deal. People aren’t as dumb as economists. They will both favor loyalty to their friend over going free for themselves, since they know they will meet again. After all, they’re friends. People build up relationships they can rely on and that let them reap the benefits of cooperation. They can work out how many sheep to put in their pasture and happily raise sheep there forever.
That’s the kind of loyalty that gives social relations power their real effectiveness . In Chicago this is pretty clear whether you’re dealing with gangs, labor unions or politicians. People do each other favors. “I owe you one,” means a lot. You can collect on that. Someone who is very good at building and using this kind of power these kinds of relationships is Barack Obama. He’s a genius of an organizer. He didn’t stop when he was elected President. He kept on organizing to keep his supporters loyal and gain the power support of public opinion to do some things the ruling class might not be very happy about. Like taxing them. Those social relations can get you into a position to make the rules of the system like Barack
Obama, or may get you into a position to move around in the system as, for instance, when a friend of yours gets you a better job.
We’ve spoken of agency your choices as something you can have more or less of , something that can be more or less appealing according to the cultural code depending on where you are in a class system or a structure of power relationships . A dean has more different ones [better ones?] than a professor who has more different ones [better ones?] than a student.
So it looks like who’s on top always wins. And
A a ll of that makes sense until the students organize, for instance, because they don’t like the idea of their university’s symbol being licensed to firms that make clothing in sweatshops. Maybe students believe that

Durrenburger: Anthropology Unbound, 2 nd
ed. Draft w/ emendations all people are created equal and that nobody should have to work in a sweatshop. So they picket the president’s office and make enough trouble for her and make enough pressure all over the university that the president refuses to license the symbolic images to the offending companies. Then the students have gained power their way this time . That’s the power effect of social relations, the power point of organizing. So, in spite of where you start in the class system, there is always space for you to maneuver, space for you to find people with common interests and to organize
, even if you don’t always get everything you try for .
If you feel that something is a problem, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it or define it, know that you’re not alone. Other people will be in the same boat. The trick is to find them, to talk with them and check your sense of things with theirs like the person who thinks maybe she’s imagining the whole world.
That’s what black people had to do to get the civil rights movement going; that’s what women had to do to get the women’s movement going. And so on. So you’re never alone. And that gives you a kind of power opportunity — but to use it, you have to know that, and to use it well, you have to get good at organizing. Look where it got Barack Obama!
From this we can see a way to even measure agency choices . A person’s agency choices depends on class, yes. But it they also depends on awareness. More than that, it they depends on social relationships that people develop in different ways. We don’t have something like a meat thermometer we can stick into people to read the number and quality of the choices available to them or that they can come up with. their amount of agency. But you can see how you might do it by measuring the number and kind of social relations and other resources they have , as well as understanding their position in the structure of the society.