It is because questions about agency are so central to contemporary political and theoretical debates that the concept arouses so much interest – and why it is so crucial to define the term clearly. The author therefore presents a provisional definition: Agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act. She then examines the practice theory approach and discusses anthropological contributions to this approach.A central dilemma for theorists who want to define agency more precisely than the barebones definition of “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act” is the question of intentionality. Any discussion of agency and language must also consider the grammatical encoding of agency. Another way of analyzing agency in language is to look for how people talk about agency through “meta-agentive discourse,” piggybacking onto the term “meta-pragmatic discourse,” as used by Michael Silverstein (1976, 1993, 2001), Debra Spitulnik (2001), and others. Finally, it is argued that the relationship between language and agency can be studied from three quite different but interrelated perspectives: linguistic structure, socio-historical processes, and discourse.