This entry reviews the concept of agency in linguistic anthropology, defined as the capacity for socially meaningful action. Under this definition, the construal of agency is an indexical process whereby people recognize actors and their identities through the interpretation of locally salient actions. The ideologies behind these interpretations directly relate to the range of possible agency and the identities any entity may be recognized to have within a particular community or situated interaction. Power, then, arises as certain semiotic ideologies become privileged over others on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, social class, ability, and other structural inequalities. Finally, academic attention to agency has opened up the term to include distributed and nonhuman forms of agency, shedding new light on how social meanings rely on and intertwine with materiality and embodiment.
