versus Agency" (Hall & Neitz 1993:15). Despite this, there is an intricate and vitally important, albeit implicit, part for culture’s cognate concept ‘meaning’. To apply structuration theory in an anthropological context, or more specifically this anthropological context, requires reinstating meaning as a tenet a little more explicitly than Giddens does. This is achieved by recognising that praxis is meaningful in all its forms and manifestations: the meaningful production and reproduction o f human projects within the on-going flow o f sociality that is the existential given, from the decentred subject’s viewpoint, and the ontological given from the analyst’s viewpoint.
Structuration theory, tendered as a counter to, on the one hand, the "imperialism o f the subject", characteristic o f interpretive and micro-sociological approaches, and, on the other, the "imperialism o f the social object" characteristic o f structuralist and macro- sociological approaches, is based on the axiom that social life is an ongoing, ceaselessly changing matrix o f meaningful activity within and through time-space. Consistent with the ontological priority o f praxis that is at the basis o f this theory, the aim is to privilege "neither the experience o f the individual actor, nor the existence o f any form o f societal totality, but social practices ordered across time and space" which, following Giddens, I prefer to simply refer to as ‘time-space’ (Giddens 1984:2). The regularized meaningful activities (praxis) produced by (decentred) agents can be understood through a revised conception o f structure. Forms o f praxis can be conceived, heuristically, to consist in ‘bound’ time-space effected through "structuring properties" which "make it possible for discernibly similar social practices to exist across varying spans o f time and space and which lend them systemic form". This "structure exists, as time-space presence, only in its instantiations in such practices and memory traces orienting the conduct of knowledgeable human agents", and forms both the means through which activities (and institutions) are produced and reproduced as well as the outcome o f such activities which in turn make it possible, as the means, for such activities to initially take place (Giddens 1984:17). Structure is specifically manifest through agents’ recourse to "rules and resources".9 Agents are knowledgeable in that they routinely monitor both their own activities as well as the social and physical characteristics o f the environments in which they move. Such knowledge in the form o f a "practical consciousness" is manifest in day- to-day life which can be conceived o f as a "flow o f intentional action". Nevertheless agents can also discursively articulate the "grounds o f their activity" (Giddens 1984:5).
9 Rules are "techniques or generalized procedures applied in the enactment/reproduction of social practices" (Giddens 1984:21). Resources are of two types, allocative and authoritative. Allocative resources are "capabilities" or specifically "forms of transformative capacity" (ie. power, to be understood as the ability to ‘make a difference’ in the world) giving agents who, in certain contexts, possess such capabilities "command over objects, goods or material phenomena". Authoritative resources involve "transformative capacity" or the capability to ‘make a difference’ in respect of other agents (Giddens 1984:33).
But agents, o f course, are not the monadic individuals we encounter in "action" theory since agents are mutually implicated in each other’s designs, plans and strategies. These activities, however, have "unintended consequences [which] may feed back to be the unacknowledged conditions o f further acts" (Giddens 1984:8), which in turn have consequences for already existing, or serve to facilitate, differential capabilities to ‘make a difference’, that is, to exercise power, in the world. These conditions may not be discursively recognised by agents even though they may be implicated in their practices on the level o f practical consciousness.
Through placing praxis at the ontological centre o f structuration theory, Giddens has cleared the way to abandon the core concepts o f ‘society’, ‘culture’, and the ‘individual’ along with all their attendant difficulties we encountered in the last chapter. The study of social life can be carried out in the most specific contexts (eg. ethnomethodological studies) or the most broad, in which the systemic and "deeply embedded" nature o f practices becomes the focus for enquiry. What are designated as ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ systems in most o f the reifying discources comprising social science are better conceptualized, not as ‘things’, but as decentred entities comprised o f social activities reproduced by decentred subjects (persons) across varying spans o f time-space. This provides a fresh starting-point for the study o f "Mentawai" and, arguably "Indonesia" as a ‘field o f ethnological study’.10
The specific aspects o f structuration directly relevant to this thesis are the concepts o f
region and locale which obviate the need to return to any notion o f a ‘society’. This is an interpretation, as well as an extension, o f these concepts which refer to similar yet divergent phenomena. However, together, they tend to present an image o f a social world already in existence rather than one (re)produced in practice, so going against the
10 Giddens, however, demonstrates tendencies towards latent essentialization where he goes on to