This article aims (1) to analytically disaggregate agency into its several component elements (though these are interrelated empirically), (2) to demonstrate the ways in which these agentic dimensions interpenetrate with forms of structure, and (3) to point out the implications of such a conception of agency for empirical research. The authors conceptualize agency as a temporally embedded process of social engagement, informed by the past (in its “iterational” or habitual aspect) but also oriented toward the future (as a “projective” capacity to imagine alternative possibilities) and toward the present (as a “practical‐evaluative” capacity to contextualize past habits and future projects within the contingencies of the moment).

What is agency

Most often, the homogenization argument subspeciates into either an argument about Americanization, or an argument about 'commoditization', and very often the two arguments are closely linked. What these arguments fail to consider is that at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way: this is true of music and housing styles as much as it is true of science and terrorism, spectacles and constitutions. The dynamics of such indigenization have just begun to be explored in a sophisticated manner

Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy

The authors analyze the nation‐state as a worldwide institution constructed by worldwide cultural and associational processes, developing four main topics: (1) properties of nation‐states that result from their exogenously driven construction, including isomorphism, decoupling, and expansive structuration; (2) processes by which rationalistic world culture affects national states; (3) characteristics of world society that enhance the impact of world culture on national states and societies, including conditions favoring the diffusion of world models, expansion of world‐level associations, and rationalized scientific and professional authority; (4) dynamic features of world culture and society that generate expansion, conflict, and change, especially the statelessness of world society, legitimation of multiple levels of rationalized actors, and internal inconsistencies and contradictions.

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World society and the nation-state

Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity

This assumed isomorphism of space, place, and
culture results in some significant problems. First,
there is the issue of those who inhabit the border,
what Gloria Anzaldua calls the “narrow strip along
steep edges” of national boundaries. The fiction ofconclusion that a focus on people who live in the borders between dominant societies or nations (and here
borders is also a metaphor for people who identify, culturally, with more than one group) makes clear the fact
that differences between cultures come about not because of their isolation from each other, but because 
of their connections with each other. Such a conclusion also suggests that along with difference comes the
hierarchies of power. Culture is not only a concept that expresses difference between peoples, but also a
concept that masks the uneven power relations between peoples, and these uneven power relations can 
only exist through connection, rather than isolation.

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Beyond “Culture”: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference

Many of the traditions which we think of as very ancient in their origins were not in fact sanctioned by long usage over the centuries, but were invented comparative recently. This book explores examples of this process of invention - the creation of Welsh Scottish 'national culture'; the elaboration of British royal rituals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the origins of imperial ritual in British India and Africa; and the attempts by radical movements to develop counter-traditions of their own. This book addresses the complex interaction of past and present, bringing together historicans and anthropologists in a fascinating study of ritual and symbolism which possess new questions for the understanding of our history.

The Invention of Tradition

Over the past two or three years there has emerged in Zimbabwe a sustained attempt by the Mugabe regime to propagate what is called ‘patriotic history’. ‘Patriotic history’ is intended to proclaim the continuity of the Zimbabwean revolutionary tradition. It is an attempt to reach out to ‘youth’ over the heads of their parents and teachers, all of whom are said to have forgotten or betrayed revolutionary values. It repudiates academic historiography with its attempts to complicate and question. At the same time, it confronts Western ‘bogus universalism’ which it depicts as a denial of the concrete history of global oppression. ‘Patriotic history’ is propagated at many levels – on television and in the state-controlled press; in youth militia camps; in new school history courses and textbooks; in books written by cabinet ministers; in speeches by Robert Mugabe and in philosophical eulogies and glosses of those speeches by Zimbabwe’s media controller, Tafataona Mahoso. It is a coherent but complex doctrine. ...

Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe

As Werner Sollors has remarked, the word ‘invention’ has ‘become a rather popular category in intellectual discourse’. No longer ‘reserved for accounts of technological advances such as the telegraph’, invention has been applied to ‘such diverse phenomena as the invention of culture; of literary history; of childhood as well as the loss of childhood; of motherhood; of kinship; of the self; of America; of the Negro; of the Indian; of the Jew’. Some usages of ‘invention’ have laid so much stress on ‘the importance of language in the social construction of reality’ as ‘to let “reality” disappear behind an inventive language that dissembles it’.1

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The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa

* Introduction - Richard Werbner * Part 1: Power, Crisis and Contested Identities * 1. The African Crisis: Context and Interpretation - Patrick Chabal * 2. Postcolonialism, Power and Identity: Local and Global Perspectives from Zaire - Filip De Boeck * 3. Between God and Kamuzu: The Transition to Multi-Party Politics in Central Malawi - Harri Englund * 4. The Potential Boundaries: Steps Toward a Theory of the Social Edge - Robert Thornton * Part 2: Gender and Generation in Conflict * 5. A Lost Generation? Youth Identity and State Decay in West Africa - Donal Cruise O'Brien * 6. AIDS, Biomedicine, and the Re-invention of Witchfinding: Death and Cosmic Defence in a Zambian Village - Bawa Yamba * 7. "Producing" Respect: The 'Proper Women' in Postcolonial Kampala - Jessica Ogden * Part 3: Religion, Dominance and Deconstruction * 8. Contested Authorities and Politics of Perception: Deconstructing the Study of Religion in Africa - Rijk van Dijk and Peter Pels * 9. Witchcraft, Violence and Identity: Different Trajectories in Postcolonial Cameroon - Cyprian Fisiy and Peter Geschiere * 10. Identity, Alterity and Ambiguity in a Nigerian Community: Competing Definitions of "True" Islam - Adeline Masquelier * Conclusion - Terence Ranger

Terence Ranger

Papers

The Invention of Tradition

Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: the Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe

The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of Colonial Africa

Postcolonial Identities in Africa

Peasant consciousness and guerrilla war in Zimbabwe