Agency is a historical concept, not a natural category

Evidence

Assuming that agency need not be conceptualized in terms of individual self-empowerment and resistance, or of utopian history, how should it be understood? One might begin by looking at usages of the term (or what are taken to be its equivalents) in different historical contexts. This would indicate not merely that agency is not a natural category, but that the successive uses of this concept (their different grammars) have opened up or closed very different possibilities for acting and being. The secular, with its focus on empowerment and history-making, is merely one of those possibilities. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 354

Categorization

• DEFINE: Key to Asad’s method: agency has different ‘grammars’ across contexts, and ‘the secular’ is only one such grammar.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 354
• XREF: connects to: Historical categories applied to actors are absconded from enemies rather than self-derived — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 460; Political agency requires historical location and stable commitments, not hybrid flux. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 921; Fanon treats colonized subjects as historical agents, not mere projections — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1340 (+1 more)