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" Distributed Agency presents an interdisciplinary inroad into the latest thinking about the distributed nature of agency: what it's like, what are its conditions of possibility, and what are its consequences. The book's 25 chapters are written by a wide range of scholars, from anthropology, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, geography, law, economics, and sociology. While each chapter takes up different materials using different methods, they all chart relations between the key elements of agency: intentionality, causality, flexibility and accountability. Each chapter seeks to explain how and why such relations are distributed-not just across individuals, but also across bodies and minds, people and things, spaces and times. To do this, the authors work through empirical studies of particular cases, while also offering reviews and syntheses of key ideas from the authors' respective research traditions. Our goals with this collection of essays are to assemble insights from new research on the anatomy of human agency, to address divergent framings of the issues from different disciplines, and to suggest directions for new debates and lines of research. We hope that it will be a resource for researchers working on allied topics, and for students learning about the elements of human-specific modes of shared action, from causality, intentionality, and personhood to ethics, punishment, and accountability. "-- "This book presents the latest thinking on the distributed nature of agency: its nature, its causes, its consequences. The book opens up fundamental questions about human agency, and offer answers that are state-of-the-art and interdisciplinary, yet accessible"-- Machine generated contents note: -- i. Contributors -- ii. Preface -- Part One: Agency as Flexible and Accountable Causality -- Chapter 1. Elements of Agency -- N.J. Enfield -- Chapter 2. Distribution of Agency -- N.J. Enfield -- Chapter 3. Gnomic Agency -- Paul Kockelman -- Chapter 4. Semiotic Agents -- Paul Kockelman -- Part Two: Agency of Institutions and Infrastructure -- Chapter 5. Agency in State Agencies -- Anya Bernstein -- 6. Upending Infrastructure in Revolutionary Egypt -- Julia Elyachar -- Part Three: Language and Agency -- 7. On Brain-to-Brain Interfaces, Distributed Agency and Language -- Mark Dingemanse -- 8. Requesting as a Means for Negotiating Distributed Agency -- Simeon Floyd -- 9. Social Agency and Grammar -- Giovanni Rossi and Jörg Zinken -- 10. Distributed Agency and Action under the Radar of Accountability -- Jack Sidnell -- Part Four: Economy and Agency -- 11. Distributed Agency and Debt in the Durational Ethics of Responsibility -- Jane I. Guyer -- 12. Money as Token and Money as Record in Distributed Accounts -- Bill Maurer -- Part Five: Distributing Agency within Selves and Species -- 13. Distribution of Agency across Body and Self -- Ruth Parry -- 14. Distributed Agency in Ants -- Patrizia D'ettore -- Part Six: Social Bonding through Embodied Agency -- 15. Group Exercise and Social Bonding -- Emma Cohen -- 16. Social Bonding Through Dance and 'Musiking' -- Bronwyn Tarr -- Part Seven: Agency and Infancy -- 17. Time Scales for Understanding the Agency of Infants and Caregivers -- Joanna Raczaszek-Leonardi -- 18. Movement Synchrony, Joint Actions and Collective Agency in Infancy -- Bahar Tunçgenç -- Part Eight: The Agency of Materiality -- 19. The Agency of the Dead -- Zoe Crossland -- 20. Distributed Agency in Play -- Benjamin Smith -- 21. Contingency and the Semiotic Mediation of Distributed Agency -- Eitan Wilf -- Part Nine: The Place of Agency -- 22. Place and Extended Agency -- Paul C. Adams -- 23. How Agency is Distributed through Installations -- Saadi Lahlou -- Part Ten: From Cooperation to Deception and Disruption -- Chapter 24. Cooperation and Social Obligations -- David P. Schweikard -- Chapter 25. Deception as Exploitative Social Agency -- Radu Umbres -- Chapter 26. Disrupting Agents, Distributing Agency -- Charles H. P. Zuckerman
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