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Distribution of agency across body and self

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posted on 2018-08-08, 14:10 authored by Ruth Parry
Distributed Agency presents an interdisciplinary inroad into the latest thinking about the distributed nature of agency: what it's like, what are its conditions of possibility, and what are its consequences. The book's 25 chapters are written by a wide range of scholars, from anthropology, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, geography, law, economics, and sociology. While each chapter takes up different materials using different methods, they all chart relations between the key elements of agency: intentionality, causality, flexibility and accountability. Each chapter seeks to explain how and why such relations are distributed-not just across individuals, but also across bodies and minds, people and things, spaces and times. To do this, the authors work through empirical studies of particular cases, while also offering reviews and syntheses of key ideas from the authors' respective research traditions. Our goals with this collection of essays are to assemble insights from new research on the anatomy of human agency, to address divergent framings of the issues from different disciplines, and to suggest directions for new debates and lines of research. We hope that it will be a resource for researchers working on allied topics, and for students learning about the elements of human-specific modes of shared action, from causality, intentionality, and personhood to ethics, punishment, and accountability.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Distributed Agency Foundations of Human Interaction

Pages

119 - 129 (10)

Citation

PARRY, R., 2017. Distribution of agency across body and self. IN: Enfield, N.J. and Kockelman, P. (eds). Distributed Agency. New York: Oxford University Press, pp.119-129.

Publisher

© Oxford University Press

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2017

Notes

This material was originally published in Distributed Agency edited by N. J. Enfield and Paul Kockelman, and has been reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press https://global.oup.com/academic/product/distributed-agency-9780190457211. For permission to reuse this material, please visit http://global.oup.com/academic/rights.

ISBN

9780190457211

Language

  • en