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. Let me therefore present a provisional definition: Agency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act. This conception rules out two oft-assumed synonyms for agency – “free will” and “resistance”. It is important for scholars to ask themselves how conceptions of agency may differ from society to society, and how these conceptions might be related to notions of personhood and causality. Among the many social theories that attempt to explain human action, practice theory presents the most promising approach, though not without its weaknesses and critics. The paper also addresses anthropological contributions to practice theory. 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 (see Giddens, Ortner, Duranti, and Kockelman). Any discussion of agency and language must further consider how grammatical categories in different languages distinguish among types of subjects, actors, or agents, for such categories, “to the extent that they are obligatory and habitual, and relatively inaccessible to the average speaker's consciousness, will form a privileged location for transmitting and reproducing cultural and social categories” (Hill & Mannheim 1992). Another way of analyzing agency in language is to look for how people talk about agency through meta-agentive discourse.As linguistic anthropologists and other scholars increasingly treat language use as a form of social action, the task of developing a theoretically sophisticated understanding of agency becomes ever more urgent. Much as Susan U. Philips (2001) has proposed for the relationship between language and power, this paper argues that the relationship between language and agency can be studied from three quite different but interrelated perspectives. First, there is agency as encoded in, and shaped by, linguistic structure, such as ergativity or pronouns, for example. Second, there is agency as embedded within large-scale socio-historical processes, and finally, there is agency as emerging from discourse, both in the sense of micro-level face-to-face interactions and also in Foucault's broader sense of discourse as a form of power to which we are all subordinated. Meta-agentive discourse can operate at both these levels.