Posthumous Agency on Facebook

Abstract

Posthumous Agency on Facebook Abstract: The concept of agency remains contested in anthropology. One aspect of the debate spans from those who, on the one hand, insist that agency is exclusive to living human beings, with all its accompanying implication, to those who, on the other, believe that non-living, non-human things also exert agency. Posthumous agency straddles this debate with its strange creature: the dead human being. In this thesis, however, I seek to examine how the dead in the context of Facebook challenge existing literature on the agency of the dead. While the agency of the dead has been recently garnering scholarly attention, this interest has focused largely on the agentive capacity of the corporeal remains of the person: corpse, ashes, bones. The dead do not simply remain dead; they remain socially, symbolically, and mnemonically significant. They further live on through distributed instances of their personhood, through their material possessions or through their surviving social relationships. I apply Alfred Gell’s theory of the art nexus to examine how the agency of the dead is abducted through their corporeal, material, and social remains. Building on three thematic treatments of posthumous agency as heuristic, I analyze the presence of the dead on Facebook to demonstrate and expound on their posthumous agency. The findings of this thesis affirm the fuzzy boundaries of agency that make agency slippery enough to be applied to the dead, to be distributed across one’s social network, and to be shared with digital technology. Show more