The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail

by Jason De León

By erroneously positioning humans as the sole agents responsible for action, we end up reducing all others to background noise, uncontrollable variables, or randomness. This results in the characterization of all agency as intentional and motivated by people—a line of thinking that fails to acknowledge that a hybrid collectif is sometimes strategic from a human perspective and other times not. This way of thinking also reduces agency to forms that only humans can recognize, which, as my crude hamburger example shows, means we miss out on quite a bit. Callon and Law make the compelling argument that agency comes in all forms, many of which humans can’t even begin to imagine. Much of this agency is “nonstrategic, distributed, and decentered” and hence difficult, if not impossible, for us to understand.19 I would add that although we can attempt for analytical purposes to isolate the relationships that perform action at any one moment, agency needs to be conceptualized as a dynamic and ongoing process.

“If we are to avoid the trap of becoming infatuated with our own intellectual-cum-magical capacity to render the world intelligible, then the vocabulary ‘we’ all too glibly project onto ‘them’ must be tested continually against the various and changing experiences of actual lives.”10