Tilly-how Do Relations Storeh Istories

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How do Relations Store Histories?Author(s): Charles TillySource: Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26 (2000), pp. 721-723Published by: Annual ReviewsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/223469 .Accessed: 04/01/2014 15:05

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Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2000. 26:721-23Copyright 2000 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

How Do RELATIONS STORE HISTORIES?

Charles TillyDepartment of Sociology, Columbia University, New York,NY 10027-7001

For most of us, alas, crucial moments in a lifetime of inquiry nvolve discov-eries that we have been asking the wrong questions. Any effort to lay the burden ofour ignorance on the next generation of researchers-which is, after all, the pointof the present exercise-will therefore erve chiefly to make members of that gen-eration eel superior. Visibly violating the interest of my future reputation, et meask out loud a deeply bothersome question: how do relations store histories? Howdoes interaction mong social locations both constrain ubsequent nteractions ndalter the relations nvolved?

My question concerns relations among social locations-not just persons butalso jobs, organizations, ommunities, networks, and other such sites, just so longas they include some distinguishing properties and coordinating tructure. t rests

on the assumption hat ndividuals as such do not constitute he bedrock of sociallife, but emerge from interaction as other social locations do.The question has two parts. First, how does the history of a social relation

impinge on subsequent activations of that relation? Second, how does interactionwithin a given relation ransform hat relation? Examples of relevant processes in-clude changes n contentious epertoires, hifts n the content and form of conversa-tion, alterations f rights or obligations, and moves of a pair between war and peace:

* In the case of contentious repertoires, elations between claimants andobjects of claims (e.g. peasants and landlords, workers and bosses) mostly

change incrementally, but as they do so claim-making trategies, mutualdefinitions, voiced grievances, and stories told about past relations allchange as well. How and why does that happen? Exactly how, for example,did the political demonstration whose routines are now so familiar omilitants and television viewers evolve from Western European petitionmarches and military displays of the late eighteenth century?

* In the case of conversation, people draw on previous nterchanges with thesame interlocutors, mprovise within limits set by shared understandings,convey the character of their relationship hrough alk, yet transform herelationship as they do so. How and why does that happen? Precisely whatprocesses, for example, go on as one friend solicits and gets effective adviceon a risky choice from another riend, or as two competing groups ofengineers within a firm work out a compromise proposal for presentation o

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management? n what ways do those processes depend on historiesof the relationships n question?

* Rights and obligations consist of enforceable claims connecting socialsites-individual or otherwise. Although participants n rights andobligations sometimes write contracts or constitutions, most of the timethey create bit-by-bit redefinitions of the enforceable claims in question.How and why does that happen? Through what interactions and appeals tomemory, or example, do companies of soldiers and their officers work outthe limits on what each can demand of the other?

* War and peace name extreme positions on a continuum of relationsbetween political units running rom 1) outright mutual destruction by

means of organized armed orce to 2) coexistence without collective strife.No war between two powers precisely mimics its predecessor, yet thehistory of relations between the parties strongly constrains he currentround of conflict. How and why does that happen? To what extent and how,for example, does accumulated knowledge of their relationship affect howleaders of Israel and Syria shift among open warfare, mutual harassment,proxy battles, and uneasy peace?

Bad answers beckon. The first bad answer, quite popular hese days, declaresthat experience of interaction alters individual consciousness, either by changing

means-end calculations or by adjusting he link between feeling and memory. Theanswer is bad because it begs the question: How do pairs or larger sets of actorsactually create and change shared understandings n the form of recognizableclaim-making performances, dialects, bodies of law, and diplomacy?

A second bad answer used to be much more popular, but has lost much ofits appeal in recent decades. The answer: Society does it. The answer is doublybad because it invokes a dubious agent and fails to state how or why that agentaccomplishes ts transformative work.

A third bad answer declares that culture, as the repository of collective expe-rience, embeds histories in relations. The answer s even worse than the first twobecause it combines their defects. It begs the question of how culture-that is,shared understandings nd their representations-changes as it invokes a dubiousagent and fails to specify how that agent creates effects in social life.

Astonished by my ignorance, tudents of conversation, trong nteraction, ym-bolic interaction, collective memory, and cultural evolution will no doubt claimthat they have already provided superior accounts of how relations store histories.To them I reply in advance: show us. My own attempts o adapt accounts n thosefields to contentious repertoires, rights, and war have so far yielded tantalizingsuggestions, but no persuasive answers. Most of them incorporate ne version oranother of the three bad answers.

Good answers? If I really knew, I wouldn't be writing this essay. For the sakeof stimulating argument, et me nevertheless dentify two paths that seem worthexploring. We might call them creative interaction and cultural ecology.



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HOWDO RELATIONS TOREHISTORIES

Creative interaction appears most visibly in such activities as jazz and soc-cer. In these cases, participants work within rough agreements on procedures and

outcomes, arbiters set limits on performances, ndividual dexterity, knowledge,and disciplined preparation enerally yield superior play, yet the rigid equivalentof military drill destroys the enterprise. Both jazz and soccer, when well exe-cuted, proceed through mprovised nteraction, urprise, ncessant error and error-correction, alternation between solo and ensemble action, and repeated responsesto understandings hared by at least pairs of players. After the fact, participantsand spectators create shared stories of what happened, and striking improvisa-tions shape future performances. f we could explain how human beings bring offsuch improvisatory adventures, we could be well on our way to accounting forhow relations store histories in contentious repertoires, conversation, rights andobligations, war and peace, and similar phenomena.

Cultural ecology? Social life consists of transactions mong social sites, someof them occupied by individual persons, but most of them occupied by shiftingaspects or clusters of persons. None of the sites, goes the reasoning, contains allthe culture-all the shared understandings-on which transactions n its vicinitydraw. But transactions among sites produce interdependence mong extensivelyconnected sites, deposit related cultural material n those sites, transform haredunderstandings n the process, and thus make large stores of culture available toany particular ite through ts connections with other sites. Relations store histories

in this dispersed way.Neither the creative interaction nor the cultural ecology path is necessarilyinconsistent with the genetic, evolutionary, and neurophysiological accounts ofhuman social life that will surely oom much larger n sociologists' thinking duringthe next few decades than hey have during he twentieth century. n fact, if genetic,evolutionary, or neurophysiological heorists would take the storage of historiesby relations seriously, they might supply the breakthrough hat has so far eludedworkaday sociologists.

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