Meanings of Agency, Agency of Meaning: On Synthesis and Entanglement

Two decades later, the conceptual problems of the term “agency” identified by Walter Johnson remain largely unresolved, in particular the analytic inhibitions that follow from what the historian Lynn Thomas has described as agency-as-argument. Taking the case of the colonial Zimbabwean chief Munhuwepayi Mangwende as a reference point, this essay argues that the microhistorical tracing of agency as meaning rather than causality is what may permit us to move past the “safe harbor” of agency-as-argument and begin to understand the full range of what people have chosen to do in the past—and to interact more effectively with what they might yet choose to do in the present.