Good to think? Creolization, optimism, and agency

Although the concept of creolization is undergoing avid and close examination by scholars from across the humanities and social sciences, the foundational assumptions by which the concept is constituted, both implicit and explicit, have been unevenly examined. The notion of agency is a key dimension of the creolization concept. Discussion of creolization and agency in a number of different usage contexts makes the creolization concept's theoretical and ideological tasks more transparent, and these tasks have implications for our understanding of the relationship between structure and agency, between power and forms of consciousness, and between theory building and ethnographic research.