Although the term agency can be found scattered throughout recent social science literature, its theoretical role is rarely made precise. In the absence of such specification, agency can sometimes be used as if it were synonymous with free will , a property purportedly possessed by atomic individuals acting outside social, political, and cultural constraints.
Many scholars also assume that all agency is oppositional and that to exercise agency is to resist.
I begin this paper with an overview of recent debates on agency in philosophy, feminist theory, history, sociology, and anthropology, then move on to what I consider a more fruitful approach. I attempt to reconceptualize agency by suggesting that rather than trying to locate agency in other societies, it is more productive to ask how people in those societies conceive of and attribute responsibility for actions. I draw on Nepali love letters and narratives of marriage in order to ascertain local conceptions of agency, paying particular attention to meta-agentive discourse and to first person pronouns with ergative markers. These narratives and letters indicate that Nepali villagers are increasingly likely to attribute events to particular individuals rather than to fate, or karma. I conclude by discussing the gendered dimensions and implications of this agentive shift.