Pathways to Agency: Cross-Cultural Evidence From Indigenous Wichi and Eurodescendant Caregiver-Infant Interactions

Abstract

This study reveals a new social interactional framework—joint agency—that permits us to better understand the early development of agency in infants being raised in culturally distinct socialization contexts. Sixteen caregiver–infant pairs (1; 0–2; 6 months) were observed in naturalistic settings within two Argentine populations—Indigenous Wichi and urban Eurodescendant. Guided in part by a Wichi category, husek ihi, the study adopts a dual analytic approach that balances cross-cultural comparability with sensitivity to interactional ecologies. The analysis proceeded in three sequential stages: (1) the development of an observational coding system to identify joint agency episodes (JAEs), (2) the characterization of these JAEs along social, semiotic, and material dimensions, and (3) the examination of the semiotic modalities through which joint agency unfolds in interaction. The evidence revealed that all infants engaged in JAEs, but that their organization differed as a function of cultural community. Among the Wichi, JAEs typically involved multiparty participation, non-verbally mediated, and engaged embodied modalities centering on available materials. In contrast, in the Eurodescendant community, JAEs were typically dyadic, verbally mediated, and centered on domestic toys. These findings offer a multimodal, culturally situated account of early agency, challenging models that treat agency primarily as the attribution of internal mental states.