Anthropology in Action, 20, no. 2 (Summer 2013): 17–27 © Berghahn Books and the Association for Anthropology in Action ISSN 0967-201X (Print) ISSN 1752-2285 (Online) doi:10.3167/aia.2013.200203 Enlivening the Supra-personal Actor Vectors at Work in a Transnational Environmentalist Federation Caroline Gatt ABSTRACT: Recent anthropological literature on NGOs has focused on the agency and creativity of activists. The focus on the subjects of NGOs and agency in this work is an explicit response to scholarship in which actors are eclipsed by formal and technical analyses of organizational structures. This article revisits the concept of organizational structure by atending to it through the experience of activists of a transnational fed- eration of environmental NGOs, namely Friends of the Earth International (FoEI). On a daily basis FoEI activists encounter and engage with various institutions. In certain situations, such institutions as well as the activists’ own organizations are experienced as agentive entities. This article argues that from certain positioned perspectives such entities have material effects as supra-personal actors. Informed by Ingold, Latour and Haraway, but also by the FoEI activists themselves, I present the interdependent concepts of vectors, direction of atention and ‘unprotected backs’. This conceptual toolbox is presented as a shared puzzle (Marcus and Fischer 1999), and as such is ac- tivism itself, that engages in conversation with environmental activists. KEYWORDS: agency, Ingold, NGOs, structure, subjectivity, supra-personal actors, vectors Introduction Questions of structure, and/or, agency, arise frequently in ethnographies of NGOs. This is unsurprising since the organizational struc- ture of an NGO is considered a distinguish- ing feature of this form of social association (Hilhorst 2003). NGOs function in what Lister (2003: 178) calls ‘legitimating environments’, the social and institutional milieus that lend legitimacy to NGOs. Within so-called North- ern legitimating environments, NGOs are also delineated according to their organizational structure (ibid.). Social associations that are not organized in a formal sense are rarely recognized as part of civil society (Hann 1996: 13; White 1996). Therefore the structure of as- sociations plays a part in creating the content of the actions, relationships and understand- ings of NGO actors. ‘For NGO actors, the legitimation of their organization is a mater of (organizational) survival’ (Hilhorst 2003: 8). In many organizational ethnographies of NGOs, however, their authors have focused on the negotiations of the day-to-day lives of NGO actors, or in other words on their agency (see for instance Riles 2000; Hilhorst 2003; Hopgood 2006; Mosse and Lewis 2006; Yarrow 2011) rather than on the constitution of such organizational structures. This article revisits the concept of organiza- tional structure refracted through the experi-