Mentalités, Identities, and Practices
Daniel
Little
University
of Michigan-Dearborn
What role do socially shared ideas and identities play in historical
causation? Large-scale historical
causation commonly involves objective factors such as climate, demography, and
natural resources; it involves as well reference to social structural factors
such as political institutions, cities, or transportation networks. Is there a rigorous meaning to be
assigned to the notion of “mentalité”—a broadly shared set of ideas and
values within a given people? Do
subjective factors such as paradigms, practices, or moral systems influence
historical change? Are social
identities among the “furniture” of history? The paper will provide a contemporary account of the nature of
“mentalité.” It will explore the
question of how mentalités and identities are embodied in an individual and a
population. In what do identities
consist? How are they created and
sustained? How do identities and
mentalités influence history—what are some of the causal pathways
(microfoundations) through which such a formation can influence historical
outcomes? And the paper will
examine several important examples of historical explanation that turns on reference
to socially shared ideas, norms, and practices. The practice of insightful historians in their treatment of
factors such as these can go a long ways towards providing illuminating answers
to these foundational questions.
The
perspective I will adopt here takes up one of the challenges that Satya
Mohanty, Paula Moya, and others present within the context of the
“post-positivist realism” approach to minority studies and literary theory (Moya and Hames-Garcia 2000): to be realist about social
identities. These authors proposed
that we should pay close attention to the social and historical mechanisms
through which identities are transmitted and embodied. Social identities are embedded in
people’s ideas, habits of mind, and schemes of thought; and they emerge as the
result of a series of experiences and social institutions. So the challenge is to identify some of
the main social mechanisms through which common identities are formed,
maintained, and transmitted within various groups over time.
Before we can confidently
judge that mentalités play an important role in historical change, we need to
raise the question of historical rigor: are the phenomena of identity,
mentalité, and practice discrete and stable enough to admit of rigorous
historical investigation? Can we
be specific enough about a given topic of inquiry in this area to permit us to
formulate achievable research goals?
Are there historical or contemporary data that will permit us to
recognize and track distinctive identities over time?
Here I will make use of the “microfoundational”
approach to historical analysis that I’ve advocated in analysis of such things
as structural causation, class politics, and everyday collective action (Little 1994, 1989, 1998). And I will attempt to formulate a series of questions and
assumptions that may permit us to attempt to begin to analyze social identities
and mentalités in these terms.
This paper falls within an attempt I’m pursuing to formulate an approach
to a “new philosophy of history”; for those interested in the underpinnings of
this approach, I’ve included two sections as appendices at the end of this
paper that describe the need for a new philosophy of history and the particular
approach I’m taking to the topic.
Need I say—this paper is
not complete or finished, but I offer it as a work in progress.
As we grapple with the social
mechanisms that underlie social identities, it is important to get a
preliminary idea of what we are referring to. The central question here is not the philosophical question
of personal identity—what makes John the same person over time. The question rather has to do with the
phenomena that are invoked when we refer to ethnic, racial, sexual, or class
identities—the ways that people think about themselves, their affinity
groups, and the world: Ahmed is a Muslim, Peter is Armenian, Alice is a New
England Protestant. The concept of
an identity is commonly used at the individual level—we attribute
specific identities to individuals based on features of the individual’s beliefs,
actions, or history on the basis of which the label is thought to be
explanatory. And it is thought
that Peter’s Armenian identity is a thick fact about him: it colors his
interpretation of the world around him (cognitive), it affects his behavior (behavioral), and it constructs the
stories that he tells about his people (narrative). But the concept of ethnic identification also functions at
the group level as well, in the form of analysis of such factors as collective
action, ethnic violence, or ethnic group electoral politics (Brass 1985; Horowitz 1985; Nash 1989; Tambiah 1991;
Varshney 2002; Hardin 1995). It is maintained that features of ethnic identity at the
individual level provide a basis for political mobilization by leaders and
parties—with the result that ethnic politics and group mobilization can
ensue. So the attribution of an
identity to an individual or a group of individuals is often thought to be
explanatory of their behavior—to an extent to be investigated.
I will begin by posing a set
of foundational questions. What is
an “identity”? How is an identity
embodied in an individual? What
are the mechanisms that reproduce these features in a population through a
“tradition”? Is there enough
stability and similarity to permit us to refer to a mentalité or identity over
time and space? What are the
mechanisms that preserve and stabilize these features? How do these facts influence historical
change and causation?
Let us begin with a few assumptions
about what we mean by a person’s identity.
· An identity is a set of
self-understandings, norms, and ideas possessed by a person; that hang together
as a cluster in a group at a time; and that lead members of that group to
identify and act as such.
This formulation needs to be
broken out in several dimensions.
· An identity is a concrete
psychological reality: moral framework, social ideology, affinities and allegiances, worldview,
emotions, norms and values. Each
of these can be investigated in substantial detail.
· An identity has much to do
with narrative: the stories we tell to say “who we are,” the stories we tell about who
“our” people are. These narratives
are flexible and influential for our actions and choices, and the actions in
turn fold into the continuing narrative.
· The various components of
identity can be culturally variable; so identities can be diverse and
historically plastic. The fact of
human cognitive and moral plasticity has large implications. Individuals and communities can rewrite
the code.
· Does every person have an
identity? Or a cultural
identity? Is it possible to
possess a “vanilla” identity—not distinctively cultural? Is it possible to have a “polyglot” or
creole identity, embodying many separate influences?
· There are important
similarities in these sets in individuals in a time and place, because of
common experiences, common institutions, and common historical settings. Putting the point over-simply:
individuals develop through the experiences they have with people and
institutions; commonalities in these experiences should give rise to common
features of mentality.
· Some of these similarities
correspond to common experiences of oppression (race, gender); others are
durable but arbitrary traditions of taste and practice (Alsatian, Breton).
· There are significant
variations in each of these ensembles of identity elements across individuals,
across time, across culture, and across group. For example, among “millenarian White Lotus adherents” in
Qing North China there are important differences in the mix of values, the
relative strength of some of the values, and the presence or absence of other
cultural features. Thus there is
no “essential White Lotus identity,” but rather a cluster of similarities among
rural Buddhist people in the region.
· Group identities supervene
upon facts about individuals, and consist in nothing more. This is the individual-level fact: that
individuals have a set of attitudes, beliefs, norms, and self-ascriptions that
have the characteristics of a “group or ethnic identity”; it is in these
individual facts that the group identity consists.
· An identity is to some extent
motivational or behavioral: persons sharing an identity have some common
motives; some level of preparation for cohesive action; and a common set of
assumptions about the world that encourages similar behavior. This is what makes mobilization around
ethnic groups a feasible strategy for political activity.
· These complexes of values,
beliefs, and traditions influence action and behavior (e.g., traditions of
solidarity among miners), so identities can have significant historical
effects.
· The role of identity in
creating qualities of sociality—altruism and other-concern, loyalty,
solidarity and fairness—is crucial for social behavior. These qualities differ consistently
across communities and across time.
These social action features derive from both theories of how things
work and from norm and value assumptions.
· The self-referential aspect of
identity is important for the explanation of behavior and agency. If I am a Welsh miner and I learn that
“miners stick together,” my own character may take on this feature—even
if I also have the capacity for timidity.
Thus the identity I come to possess in turn affects the development of
my individual personality, which in turn influences my dispositions to
behavior.
Let us now turn to more
extensive discussion of some of the most critical issues raised here: how are
identities made and sustained, and what factors lead to change in identities
over time?
· What are the causal
foundations are that reproduce and sustain this cluster of items?
· What are some of the
normative/coercive elements that gain consent around the behaviors associated
with the identity?
What is involved in the
“making” of a group identity? What
is involved in sustaining it? Are
there corrective mechanisms that constrain random drift of identity elements
across time, space, and groups? An
identity is the result of a personal series of experiences, emerging from
concrete and historically specific institutions and circumstances. So it should be possible to arrive at
empirical and historical theories of how interactions and institutions combine
to create embodied “mentalités” in young people.
An important existential
feature of identity formation has to do with the relationship between the
individual and a social network of interaction among people bearing this
identity. The individual is
offered examples of good behavior and thought by others within his/her social
network, and the individual is quietly rewarded and punished by others within the
social network on the basis of the degree of fit between behavior and group
expectations. Thus there is an
aspect of “ascriptiveness” to many identities. Rachel has her specific identity as a Russian Jew, in part,
because others attribute the identity to her and create a regulative scheme
that affects her behavior through example, incentive, and punishment. When she acts “out of role,” it is
likely enough that she will be sanctioned in one way or another.
These points make it clear
that an identity is socially constructed: it is informed and shaped by the actions of
others, and it is partially constituted by regulative categories expressed by
others (Hacking 1999). Specific institutions contribute to the socialization
described here; education, socialization, and maturation are concrete social
processes. And an important
insight of Marxism and feminism arises here: those institutions are “biased” by
the social, economic, and gendered interests and assumptions of those who lead
and embody them. So it is
reasonable to expect that the identity and mentality elements that emerge will
themselves possess some degree of cognitive and normative bias.
These assumptions presuppose a
set of processes of “socialization” and “acculturation”: during childhood
development through which the person absorbs values, cognitive frameworks,
worldviews, and dispositions. Each individual arrives at a durable set of
values, cognitive frameworks, narratives, and assumptions of commonsense
through routine processes of socialization. A normal human raised in typical social settings will
internalize values, worldview, assumptions, through routine processes of
cultivation, socialization, and language learning. But this process is not deterministic or mechanistic. Different individuals, exposed to the
same social, cultural, and political environments, can achieve different
configurations of identity elements.
We can say that the result of
socialization is the mature human being, possessing a personality (specific
habits of thought), “mentalité” (a set of mental frameworks, assumptions, and
motivations), an identity.
Becoming developed through socialization involves acquiring—
· a stock of factual beliefs;
· a scheme for acquiring and
assessing new beliefs (especially about causal properties)
· a set of norms, values, and
wants
· a scheme for deliberating
normatively
· a set of habits and practices
for interpreting and responding to the world and its typical situations
· This is subjective experience
but also socially embedded.
Institutions shape and
propel the development of the social psychology of the individuals— young
and mature—who pass through them.
Important instances include family, schooling, religious institutions,
youth networks, military, and media.
Schematically, how do these institutions work to shape and influence
individual beliefs, frameworks, motives, traditions, etc.? The transmission of values and
worldview within the family appears to be a relatively straightforward process,
and in traditional societies it is an especially crucial part of
socialization. Children acquire a
fund of knowledge, practical skills, moral ideas, and dispositions of character
from their parents—through example, through discipline and correction,
and through routine social interaction.
Schools and religious institutions provide the young with another axis
of social example and instruction that shapes their knowledge and value
sets. Interaction with peers,
teachers, and religious authorities provide more opportunities for the young to
develop their social grammars, their stocks of commonsense, their values and
norms, etc. Pervasive
communications technologies—broadcast media, for example—have the
capacity to model values, stories, fads, and examples of behavior—which
the young “learning machines” incorporate into their ongoing representations of
the world and their position within it.
A
central empirical fact is that individuals often develop their identity
elements in highly common circumstances—work, race, geography, urban
landscape, rural circumstances, language.
And they do so in interaction with each other in ways that reinforce
identity elements. So it is understandable
that important and distinctive identity elements emerge—resulting in
credible commonalities of “group identity”. This helps explain some important
macro-identities—gender, Chinese-American, unionist. It also helps explain less obvious facts—the
solidarity of miners, the sneaker preferences of Brooklyn teenagers, the
insularity of Appalachians.
Important
examples of this feature of identity formation include gender, race, and
work. Marxist sociologists have
given a good deal of attention to the ways in which work
environments—factories, mines, or workshops—influence the
development of a shared social psychology among the people who work in these
environments. The regulation of
the work environment; the alienation created by the work process; the everyday
forms of resistance developed by workers (jokes, working slow, petty theft) all
have effects on the social psychology of workers.
Gender
and sexuality likewise structure the experiences of women and people of a
variety of sexual orientations.
Visible and invisible codes of conduct encourage and sanction a variety
of forms of behavior for people in various of these groupings—with
effects both on external behavior and internalized norms and expectations. The common experience of
discrimination, coercion, and domination creates a social psychology for
members of these groups that influences worldview, norms, and
self-expectations.
The
fact of racialized treatment of people based on racial attributes creates
another set of identity-forming elements of social psychology for members of
visible racial groups. The fact of
discrimination and unequal treatment, the fact of the threat of racial violence
for non-conforming members of racial groups—has evident effects on the
social psychology of members of groups defined in these terms. But it is also possible to track the
workings of “within-group” socialization—the proliferation of positively
marked modes of speech and behavior within the group.
· We would like to know more
about the mechanisms of change—the social processes through which an
identity may “drift” or mutate over time.
· We would expect there to be a
range of degrees of occurrence of the various elements of the “identity” and
different levels of attachment to the various elements and norms. So historical and contemporary research
ought to be deliberately anti-essentialist.
· We would like to assess the
degree to which identities and mentalités are relatively stable historical
constructions.
The
stability question comes down to this: do the central features of a given
social identity show a reasonable degree of continuity and stability across the
population bearing the identity, and across time for this people through
generational change? Or are the
features we have identified here so plastic that it is more reasonable to assume
that they change too quickly to allow them to function as historical
causes? Are there feedback
mechanisms within a population that work to contain drift and diffusion within
a group identity? Or do processes of Brownian motion introduce an unavoidable entropy
into group identities?
Some
of the factors identified above serve as well to provide some degree of
stability across generational change. The ‘tuning’ that results across persons
as they interact has the effect of stabilizing a set of identity elements. My
beliefs and norms are adjusted as I interact with others in daily life. And as
I interact with others who share antecedent identity elements, my idiosyncratic
modifications are pruned. (It should be possible to model stability and change
within a population by hypothesizing mutation and correction rates.)
The
common circumstances discussed above have a stabilizing effect on at least some
of the forms of identity that human beings experience. If domination and discrimination are
important determinants of female or racial identity, and if those patterns of
social relationship are embedded in enduring social structures—then we
should expect the elements of female or racial identity to persist with some
stability over time.
The
institutional mechanisms of identity formation enumerated here raise the
possibility of bias (in the evolutionary sense). Individuals and groups have
interests. And the mechanisms identified here are themselves embodied by
individuals who possess both identities and interests. So it is credible that
the messages conveyed by these mechanisms will reflect both—leading to a
bias of identity elements that conform to these interests and identities. Media
processes reflect a set of interests. Religious institutions convey a
deliberate set of values. And so on. So it is plain that social identities are
socially charged. Discussion above
highlighted the ways that background social processes embed discrimination and
domination for some visible groups—with the result that race, gender,
sexuality take shape in socially charged ways.
· How can we empirically
investigate the specifics of a socially embedded identity? Are there “markers” of a given identity
that can be traced through the historical record so that we can observe the
dispersion and mutation of an identity across space and time? What are the tools through which we can
arrive at accurate “portraits” of the identities in play at a given moment in
history?
How
might the features we have identified here as contributing to a group identity
function within historical explanation?
Here are several ways:
· explanations of collective
behavior (Tilly, Thompson, Kuhn, Naquin); part of collective intentionality
· explanations of the diffusion
of ideas and innovation (Rowe; kinship groups and networks)—unconscious
effects
· explanations of differences in
response to types of social institutions—draft, tax regimes, corruption
control
· moral systems, widely shared,
influence social behavior (Moore 1978)
Let us turn now to a topic
that may seem unrelated, but is not: the nature of a social practice. Practices, like identities, proliferate through a population
and distinguish the group from those in other times and places. Like identities and mentalités, it is
important for us to have an account of the social mechanisms through which
practices develop, mutate, and reproduce.
But, unlike identities, they may be entirely un-self-conscious. It is possible—even
common—that individuals may embody a practice in their everyday
activities without marking its distinctiveness and contingency. So what are some of the mechanisms
through which practices find social embodiment?[1] First, though, what is a social
practice? Let us begin with this
simple formulation:
· A practice is an ensemble of
techniques, skills, and stylized choices, embedded in a population at a time
and sustained through social mechanisms of transmission.
Big questions
about practices
· how are they embodied?
· how do they proliferate?
· how do they influence
historical outcomes?
· how do they create
differential historical outcomes?
· is there a self-referential
element in practices—do people deliberately or consciously modify their
practices?
· do practices have stability
over time? Or do they morph so flexibly as to defy analysis?
· Are there signatures for given
ensembles of practices? E.g. a given set of features of device design. A set of
techniques of water management or irrigation. With a signature it is possible
to track the spread of a practice.
A snapshot of a social
practice at a time consists in the practical knowledge embodied in a set of
individuals at a time. Two levels of
question now arise: how did that state of practical knowledge get transmitted
to the individuals who now possess it?
And how does that state of practical knowledge change over time, through
transmission and mutation?
What is the social reality of
a given social practice? It is the
embodied folk beliefs, skills, and material objects of a given population at a
particular time. It is transmitted from practitioner to practitioner (perhaps
parent to child) through training and imitation. Sometimes organizations play a
causal role in transmission (e. g. the state’s agricultural extension service
or private organizations). When a
practice is firmly entrenched in a region (i.e. shared by a large number of
practitioners) it can have effects on distant outcomes—urbanization,
population growth, etc.
Consider for example farming
practices in traditional agricultural societies (Fagan 2000), (Netting 1993). In this case, the practice involves knowledge concerning
crops, animals, seeds, irrigation, fertilizer, timing, and response to the
unexpected. It is embodied in local knowledge, folk beliefs, techniques and
tools, and custom.
The example of traditional
boat design is a good one (Elster 1983), (Sverrisson 2002). This represents a body of skill and technique transmitted
from master to apprentice.
There are important
differences between the items we identify as “practices” and those we identify
as “identities” above. Most
salient is the fact that a practice may be entirely unconscious in the people
who exercise the practice. They
may not recognize that there is a distinctive set of techniques that
characterize their practical lives, and may not recognize the social mechanisms
through which these elements are transmitted across space and generation.
Innovation occurs as local
illiterate but intelligent farmers discover enhancements. (Fagan describes an ensemble of
techniques in medieval Flanders; (Fagan 2000 : chap 6).) These innovations are imitated and reproduced by
neighbors. An ensemble of
techniques constitutes local knowledge and shared agricultural practice. Naturally there is nothing inherently
optimal or progressive about such a process. Good ideas and innovations die out; mediocre practices
persist; and sometimes genuine advances occur. Thus Fagan writes of the English response to Lowland
innovation: “The custom and prejudice of generations kept innovation at bay” (Fagan 2000 : 107). “In most cases farmers probably copied their neighbors or
landlords in adopting new practices” (Fagan 2000: 108).
An important question is that
of the “plasticity” of practices: how readily do they morph over time and space
(akin to the way in which messages morph in the game of “telephone”)? Is there an analogy between a practice
and a gene, in which the gene encodes instructions for the
phenotype—producing a next-generation genotype? Biological evolution depends on the fact that gene
transcription is a highly accurate process, so the offspring is highly likely
to encode the same bits of information as the parent. Is there the requisite
stability within the domain of practices?
Is it possible to document
distinct bodies of practice by region, period, or culture? Are there scholars who have done
that? One important tool that we
have that enhances the visibility of social practices has to do with the
material expressions of social practice: tools, artifacts, and products. It is possible to infer a great deal
about the practical technology in use in a region at a time by studying the
tools and products that the technology gave rise to. And it is therefore possible to track changes in practice
over time and geography by tracking the dispersion of tools and products. A new technique in ceramics can often
be pinpointed in a place at a time; then through archeological research it is
often possible to track the diffusion of the innovation over the next century
to other places. And once we’ve
done that, we can ask productive questions about what the mechanisms of the
diffusion of practical knowledge were: migration of farmers and artisans, trade
routes, the sale of books and pamphlets, …
There
is a point of convergence in our discussions of identities and practices, on
the topic of popular action.
Thompson (Thompson 1971), Bianco (Bianco 2001), and Tilly (Tilly 1986) have all shown that popular
protest—bread riot, tax uprising, or revolutionary
demonstration—have essential and distinctive elements of what we have
called “practice” embedded within them.
There are stylized patterns of protest that recur throughout a given
tradition—French rural people, Chinese villagers, Italian industrial
workers—that represent historically developed palettes of protest. These are not instances of “generally
optimal tools of protest”, but rather highly specific traditions of popular
action that could have evolved very differently. Tilly documents the continuity of patterns of protest
through French contention, and Thompson demonstrates that bread riots had a
distinctive moral economy that prevailed at a time and changed over time. Individuals have learned how to express
their protest and how to come together in stylized forms of collective
action—”this is what we do when the landlords ignore subsistence crisis.”
We can learn a great deal
about difficult issues in social inquiry and social explanation by attending to
the intellectual practice of outstanding historians. This approach will be particularly helpful in our effort to
refine our understanding of the role of identities and practices in
history. We will deepen our
understanding of the workings of identities and mentalités by paying close
attention to several authors who have offered productive analysis of such
things as class consciousness, rebellious politics, and traditional
agricultural practices. In the following,
then, I will highlight some of the important contributions to the topic of
“material foundations of identities” contained in the work of E. P. Thompson,
James Scott, Charles Tilly, and Marc Bloch. Each of these is a master historian (or historically minded
social scientist). And each has
made a profound contribution to our understanding of some of the ways in which
ideas, norms, and mentalités work in real historical contexts.
E.
P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class (Thompson 1966) represents a tour de force in
the concrete, meso-level investigation of the formation of a class. Thompson analyzes “class”, but he
offers trenchant criticism of the structuralist definition of this
concept—the notion that a class is a group of people defined by their
shared position within the relations of production.
· How does Thompson identify or
define “working class identity”?
· What mechanisms does he
identify in the “making”?
· What institutions or practices
stabilize these identities over decades?
Thompson formulates his
understanding of “class” in these terms:
By class I understand an
historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected
events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is an historical
phenomenon. I do not see class as
a “structure”, nor even as a “category”, but as something which in fact happens
(and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships. (Thompson 1966: 9)
The outstanding fact of the
period between 1790 and 1830 is the formation of ‘the working class’. This is revealed, first, in the growth
of class-consciousness: the consciousness of an identity of interests as
between all these diverse groups of working people and as against the interests
of other classes. And, second, in
the growth of corresponding forms of political and industrial organisation. (Thompson 1966 : 194)
The book represents Thompson’s
effort to identify the concrete historical processes and institutions through
which the consciousness of English men and women crystallized around a class
identity. There was nothing
inevitable about this process, and we can imagine that different historical
circumstances could have resulted in a very different outcome (people
identifying themselves regionally, nationally, or religiously, for
example).
Thompson emphasizes the
“agency” aspects of the processes he describes: members and leaders of this
group actively shaped the identity of class towards which they moved through
the first half of the nineteenth century in England. “The working class made
itself as much as it was made” (Thompson 1966 : 194). Leaders play an important role in the story that Thompson
advances, and their leadership is embodied in the ideas, doctrines, and
institutions that they articulated and promulgated. Paine, Thelwall, Hardy, Spence—all these thinkers and
leaders play a crucial role in the process of transformation and creation that
Thompson describes.
Political
debates, facilitated by organizations, corresponding societies, and pamphlets,
played a critical role in the emergence of the class consciousness that
Thompson describes. The London
Correspondence Society (LCS) is a key protagonist in Thompson’s story; it was
an organization whose leaders articulated political positions, mobilized
followers, and communicated publicly and privately with followers and other
organizations in other places. The
main dimensions of these debates served to frame the politics of the century:
constitution; liberty; inequality; property; participation in government;
freedom of consciousness. And
Thompson believes that the practical intellectual engagement that leaders and
ordinary working people had in these debates played a very important role in
the fashioning of English class identity.
“In the end, it is the political context as much as the steam-engine,
which had most influence upon the shaping consciousness and institutions of the
working class” (Thompson 1966 : 197).
Here again it appears that
contingency is a critical element of the story; if different currents of
thought had been most prominent—if more attention to economic and social
equality had been the rule in place of the constitutionalism of many of the
debates Thompson describes—it is possible to imagine that English working
class consciousness would have developed into a more revolutionary key.
Traditions of popular
protest—the grain riot, the moral economy of the crowd—both
represent the manifestation of an embodied group identity, and a central
mechanism through which these strands of identity are conveyed from generation
to generation. In “The Moral
Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century” Thompson provides a
highly focused and detailed interpretation of the values and paradigms of the
crowd (Thompson 1971, 1991). Rejecting the view that riot and collective disturbance
results as a reflex to grain shortage or price surge, Thompson shows that
disturbances were highly structured and disciplined, and that they were
provoked against a background of very specific values and expectations on the
part of the under-class. His
treatment centers on the role of grain and bread in the domestic economy of the
poor. And he argues that there is
clear evidence of a specific set of expectations about markets, the
availability of grain, and the constraints on grain prices that governed
popular behavior in times of dearth.
It was a community-based ethic, a paternalistic set of values that
placed obligations on farmers, traders, and officials—or else threatened
to produce a daunting range of expressions of popular unrest. He finds that both ends of this range
of social action find their origin in the sixteenth century Book of Orders. Two hundred years later the crowd is found to be exacting
sales of grains from farmers and transporters—just as prescribed by the Book
of Orders (Thompson 1991 224 ff.).
The state plays an important
role in Thompson’s story. He
documents alternating periods of repression and benign neglect of working
people’s organizations. Here again
the important message of contingency percolates through the account. Another important element of Thompson’s
story of the emergence of “class” in England is the activity of Protestant
churches throughout the period.
Churches were places for debate; for principled discussion and
disagreement; for organization around shared tasks—in short, they represented
salient points of mobilization and cultivation of values and political
attitudes.
So through a number of
different avenues—church, political societies, conditions of urban and
rural work, and collective action—English working people came to have (came
to fashion for themselves) a distinctive complex of values, narratives, and
aspirations—an identity.
Marc
Bloch offers a deeply insightful treatment of the nature and development of
French medieval agriculture. His
treatment brings together the history of technology, the social relations of
rural France, and the material culture that bound social life and work together
in early medieval France. His most
influential book is, of course, Feudal Society (Bloch 1964). But here I will draw some important observations from French
Rural History (Bloch 1966). The heart of what I want to emphasize in Bloch’s treatment
of French agriculture is the notion that there are distinctive and important
practices that embodied this agricultural system; that these practices can be
identified through various markers (place names, agricultural implements, and
field shape, for example); and that they are distinctive of this region in this
long durée. Agricultural practice
is thus an important example of a dispersed set of knowledge and techniques
within a population, transmitted by social mechanisms that can be studied, with
long-standing implications for such things as commercial development,
transportation, movements of peoples, and the transmission of ideas. “An agrarian regime is not
characterized solely by its crop rotation. Each regime is an intricate complex of techniques and social
relations” (35).
Techniques of viniculture
represent a fairly visible illustration: the practical knowledge, tools, and
techniques associated with the growing of grapes and the preparation of wine
represent a specialized knowledge that diffused perceptibly through France in
the middle ages. This too is a
form of “local knowledge”, embodied in the practices, tools, and folk beliefs
conveyed through concrete local mechanisms of influence and education. Field shape is one of the compelling
examples that Bloch analyzes—the long rectangular fields of northern
France, in contrast to the patchwork of irregular geometries of southern
France. Crop selection and
cultivation varied across regions—”the rules governing cultivation varied
considerably according to the region” (26). It is possible to discern different systems of crop rotation
across the map of France—all embodying attempts to allow the soil to
recover its natural fertility, but implemented in regionally and culturally
specific ways. One of Bloch’s
recurring sources of evidence for varying social practices is linguistic; thus,
in describing systems of triennial rotation he writes that “the names for these
divisions vary with the region and include soles, saisons, cours, cotaisons, royes or coutoures, and in Burgundy, fins, épis or fins de pie” (30). Likewise, he offers inventory of a
variety of words used to describe bounded parcels: “quartiers, climates,
cantons, contrées, bènes, triages, delles” (38).
Bloch notes that marketing is
itself a mentality: rural people must acquire a new set of attitudes and
expectations before they will be prepared to release their grain to markets in
more distant places (22). Bloch
writes, “When one considers all the patient observation, practical intuition
and willing co-operation, unsupported by any proper scientific knowledge, which
from the dawn of our rural history must have gone into the cultivation of the
soil, one is filled with feelings of admiration akin to those which inspired
Vidal de la Blache” (26).
Bloch emphasizes throughout
the importance of regional variation of agricultural practices—another
marker of socially transmitted forms of local knowledge:
The exact geographical
distribution of these two rotations [biennial and triennial] has not so far
been established. It would
probably not be difficult to reconstruct the pattern as it was in the late
eighteenth century, before the more flexible rotation introduced by the
agricultural revolution put an end to fallowing; but for this we should need
detailed studies which are at present lacking. What is certain is that the two systems occupied distinct
blocks of territory, and had done so since the Middle Ages. (31)
It
is worth inventorying the main forms of evidence that Bloch uses in
establishing the nature, distribution, and evolution of social practices in
medieval agriculture: place names, estate surveys, edicts, rustic calendars,
village groundplans, census records, seigneurial archives, …
It
is worth noting the play of contingency and opportunism in Bloch’s historical
vision: he describes, for example, the gradual increase in field size as the
plough is driven a little beyond its legal limit, year after year (37). Here is an instance of the opportunism
of the medieval actor leaving a permanent imprint upon the land. On the other hand, Bloch identifies the
role of compulsion as an ineffable mark on the face of the agrarian community:
“Only a society of great compactness, composed of men who thought instinctively
in terms of community, could have created such a regime” (45).
Another telling observation: “How true it is that all rural customs take
their origin from an attitude of mind!
In 1750, when there was a proposal to introduce into Brittany a modified
form of the common herd, under which the arable would still be protected, the
representatives of the Breton Estates rejected as unpracticable a measure
accepted as part of the natural order by the peasants of Picardy, Champagne and
Lorraine” (59).
Bloch’s
thinking is deeply spatial; he is frequently drawn to imagine how the social
practices he describes would be distributed on a map of France. Thus: “In the present state of our
knowledge, a distribution map would show the following as areas of enclosure:
the whole of Brittany, … Maine; Perche; the bocages of Poitou and Vendée; most
of the Massif Central, … Bugey and the Pays de Gex; and finally the Basque
lands of the extreme south west” (59).
Interestingly
for our purposes, Bloch takes issue with other historians’ efforts to account
for regional differences in terms of ethnicity or race. Thus he takes up earlier efforts to
explain differences in agrarian regime on the basis of Volkgeist: “’Race’ and ‘people’ are
words best left unmentioned in this context; in any case, there is nothing more
elusive than the concept of ethnic unity.
It is more fruitful to speak of types of civilization” (62). I would interpret his points here as
demanding a more disaggregated account: an account that looks for a more
fine-grained analysis of geography, local practice, inherited agrarian regime
in our historical efforts to account for specific regional outcomes.
Bloch
sometimes turns to the issues of collective action, riot, and resistance that
others of the authors whom I have singled out here treat as well. He emphasizes what Scott calls
“everyday resistance” over insurrection as the more influential course: “Almost
invariably doomed to defeat and eventual massacre, the great insurrections were
altogether too disorganized to achieve any lasting result. The patient, silent struggles stubbornly
carried on by rural communities over the years would accomplish more than these
flashes in the pan” (170).
James
Scott has done important and innovative work on the role of elements of
identity in social and political processes. His “moral economy of the peasant” places a shared set of
moral premises at the center of his account of popular politics (Scott 1976). Here he argues that peasant rebellions (in southeast Asia in
particular) are best understood as collective manifestations in which perceived
breaches of a subsistence ethic are prominent and enduring; it is not the
intensity of exploitation, Scott argues, but the mismatch between landlord
behavior and the requirements of the subsistence ethic that most often support
mass mobilization for uprising and resistance. And he offers a substantive material theory of how this
moral economy emerges and persists. Weapons of the Weak offers detailed ethnography
of how these identity elements emerge in local behavior (Scott 1985). And he provides documentation of a thick shared moral and
factual framework through which these people see the local world they inhabit.
Scott moves forward his
thinking about the role of identities and values in social process in Domination
and the Arts of Resistance (Scott 1990). Several ideas play a central role in this book. Here Scott puts forward a view of
underclass people that emphasizes their clearsighted understanding of their
situation. Challenging the Marxist
theory of ideology (where the ideas of the dominant class come to permeate the
whole of society), Scott argues that people in dominated groups generally have
a reasonably accurate view of their circumstances and the social relations of
power through which their lives are directed; but they have mastered a language
and conceptual scheme that permits them to accommodate to power. He postulates multiple
“transcripts”—the official transcript of the dominant group and the hidden
transcript of the dominated. “My
broad purpose is to suggest how we might more successfully read, interpret, and
understand the often fugitive political conduct of subordinate groups. . .
. For subordinate groups that find
themselves in roughly the same boat as the poor of Sedaka, I reasoned, political
life might assume analogous forms.
That is, their politics too might make use of disguise, deception, and
indirection while maintaining an outward impression, in power-laden situations,
of willing, even enthusiastic consent” (Scott 1990 : 17).
Scott places emphasis on the
moments of drama when characters in the dominated groups “speak truth to
power”—reveal their views from the point of view of the hidden
transcript. He quotes from George
Eliot’s Daniel Deronda: “And the intense hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence
and drives vehemence into constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary
annihilation of the detested object, something like the hidden rites of
vengeance with which the persecuted have a dark vent for their rage” (Scott 1990 : 1). These moments are important, not only because of the moment
of social drama that they represent, but because they represent a moment in
which the underlying truths that are perceived by each protagonist are laid
bare.
The hidden transcript reflects
the framing facts about the social order that the dominated group has come to
recognize. But it is forged
through experience: “Just as traditional Marxist analysis might be said to
privilege the appropriation of surplus value as the social site of exploitation
and resistance, our analysis here privileges the social experience of
indignities, control, submission, humiliation, forced deference, and
punishment” (111). “Resistance, then,
originates not simply from material appropriation but from the pattern of
personal humiliations that characterize that exploitation” (111-112).
For my purposes the point is
this. Scott’s work provides powerful examples of rigorous use of identity and
mentalité in social change. His work challenges some fixed ideas; it brings
together material factors of ordinary life; and it offers substantive analysis
of how identities and norms influence outcomes through individual and group
behavior.
Charles
Tilly’s lifelong work on contentious politics provides another fertile example
of the role of identities and practices in history. And Tilly offers significant progress on the task of
reconstructing the “microfoundations” through which identity, group, and
political practice emerge through identifiable material processes. Marxist theorists of revolution have
made revolution too easy, in several ways. First, they have often made the “making of a class” too
mechanical and straightforward.
Once a material class recognizes its interests, it will have a
collective purpose in acting on behalf of these class interests. But collective action is never that
simple; shared interests intersect with, and often conflict with, personal,
familial, local, regional, national, racial, workplace, religious and other
forms of interest.[2] So there are many hard
questions—How and when do material interests become salient for
collective action? And through
what means do leaders and groups attempt to act on the interests that have been
mounted as salient?
This
is the set of questions to which Tilly’s long career has offered such deep and
nuanced answers. In The Vendée (Tilly 1964) he follows out one line of
analysis—the complex and historically specific material circumstances
through which different groupings in the Vendée region came to identify their
interests in different ways, and to affiliate with each other in different ways
leading to counter-revolution. In The
Contentious French (Tilly 1986) he traces a different thread:
the evolving set of practices through which the “contentious French” have
chosen to make their voices and deeds heard: riot, seizure, crop burning,
… It is Tilly’s central
achievement to have identified popular unrest as itself a family of practices,
maintained in popular memory and reaffirmed through future actions. “As people’s grievances, hopes,
interests, and opportunities for acting on them change, so do their ways of
acting collectively” (Tilly 1986 : 3). And Tilly maintains that groups establish traditions and
repertoires of popular unrest that are historically distinctive—not
generalized solutions to exploitation and tyranny, but historically conditioned
sets of stylized responses that are available for choice in new
circumstances. “With regard to any
particular group, we can think of the whole set of means it has for making
claims of different kinds on different individuals or groups as its repertoire
of contention. Because similar
groups generally have similar repertoires, we can speak more loosely of a
general repertoire that is available for contention to the population of a time
and place. That includes a time,
place, and population as broad as seventeenth-century France. The repertoire actually constrains people’s
action; people generally turn to familiar routines and innovate within them,
even when in principle some unfamiliar form of action would serve their
interests much better” (4). He
offers these examples of actions within the French repertoire through the
mid-nineteenth century: grain seizure, invasion of fields, destruction of
tollgates, attacks on machines, serenades, expulsion of tax officials,
tendentious holiday parades, intervillage battles, pulling down of private
houses, forced illuminations, acting out of popular judicial proceedings,
turnouts (392). By the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries the repertoire had altered: strikes,
demonstrations, electoral rallies, public meetings, petition marches, planned
insurrections, invasions of official assemblies, social movements, and
electoral campaigns have replaced these more traditional forms of collective
action (393).
Tilly
takes it as axiomatic that large structures influence politics. His question is, how do the particulars
of identity and repertoire shape the responses that individuals and groups take
to these large structures—state, market, economy? “Our problem is to trace how the big
changes affected the interests, opportunities, and organization of different
groups of ordinary people during the centuries since 1598, then to see how
these alterations of interests, opportunities and organization reshaped the
contention of those people” (5).
Among
the factors that Tilly identifies as central to collective action are: “the
population’s daily routines and internal organization; … prevailing standards
of rights and justice; … the population’s accumulated experience with
collective action; … current patterns of repression” (10). “The dominant question will
remain: How did statemaking and capitalism alter the ways in which ordinary
French people acted together—or, for that matter, failed to act
together—on their shared interests?” (11).
Tilly
emphasizes the interplay between structural and material factors, on the one
hand—the instruments of exploitation and repression, chiefly—and
the historically variable and contingent means that peoples have developed to
permit them to—sometimes!—resist these factors as they attempt to
order their lives as well as possible.
What is chiefly of interest in the present context is his emphasis on
the subjective factor in this dynamic—the contingent, historically
variable development of a toolkit of collective action. Successful tools for collective action
are just as difficult to discover as successful schemes of crop rotation; and
once imagined, they become the (again, variable) content of popular memory and
the basis for the next collective effort to defend collective interests.
Just
as Marc Bloch can fruitfully trace the movement of specific agricultural
techniques across the map of France, so Tilly can attempt to discern the
diffusion of the field invasion or the ceremonial burning of tax records. And in both cases we can ask the
microfoundational questions: how are these forms of local knowledge conveyed,
diffused, and adapted to new circumstance?
This
effort moves us forward in several ways in attempting to formulate a “theory”
of identities. First, it lays out
the several dimensions of inquiry that are needed: psychological (how are identities
embodied in the individual); sociological (how are identities transmitted and
sustained); empirical (how much stability or plasticity is there in an identity
formation?); and historical-causal (how do these complexes of institutions and
identity elements influence historical change?).
Second
is more topical to the “Future of Minority Studies” project. I suggest that there are fertile
strands of research in historical social science that permit us to broaden and
deepen our understanding of these issues and topics, and that give us a deeper
understanding of the ways in which meaning elements interact with structural or
material elements. People and
peoples act—and they do so in the context of both structural conditions
and habits of mind. These habits
of mind are historically durable (to some extent), and they influence the frame
of action and the outcomes and strategies that historically situated
individuals take.
So
a careful re-reading of historians such as Bloch, Tilly, Thompson, or Scott can
take us a long ways towards a better understanding of the causes, variety, and
trajectories of social identities and practices. And—as is characteristic of the very best social
science and historical research—these authors take us to sometimes
surprising insights into how these factors work in real historical contexts.
This paper, like the several
upon which it builds, falls within what I would like to call a “new philosophy
of history.”[3] Why do we need a new philosophy of
history? Because the subject is
intellectually important, and because philosophy has made very little progress
in this field in decades.
The philosophy of history is
one of the genuine backwaters of philosophy, without significant new
developments in 50 years (Gardiner 1952, 1974), (Walsh 1968), (Carr 1962), (Gallie 1964), (Hook 1955), (White 1969). Kant, Hegel, and Marx constituted one important strand of
thought within the philosophy of history—the strand that asks “what is
history about?” This approach we might call
“substantive philosophy of history”; it is about the metaphysics of
history. It asks questions such as
these: what is the inner meaning of history? Is there a grand story that is played out through
“accidental” historical developments?
Is history intelligible? Is
there an underlying “reason” in history?
Hegel answered the question in one way—that history is the
unfolding of human freedom (Hegel 1975). Marx answers the question in another way—that the
underlying driver in historical change is the tension between the forces and
relations of production, or class struggle. Other great thinkers have turned their minds to these sorts
of questions—or example, Montesquieu (Montesquieu et al. 1989; Montesquieu and Lowenthal
1965). This family of approaches to the philosophy of history is
broadly speaking “metaphysical”; these philosophers ask questions about the
being of history, its fundamental nature.
A
second, and more compelling, strand within the philosophy of history can be
referred to as “epistemology of historical knowledge.” This approach converges with the most
abstract end of the discipline of historiography; it has to do with historical
methodology and inference. What
can we know about the past? What
are the chief types of evidence and inference through which we arrive at
justified beliefs about the past?
What are some chief barriers to knowing the past? Weber, for example, put it forward that
all representations of the past unavoidably represent a construction based both
on contemporary evidence and contemporary analytical assumptions (Weber 1949, 1975, 1977). So there is no single or unified answer to the question,
what was the Roman republic?
Instead, there are related families of answers that differ in terms of
the ways in which the question is formulated and the assumptions we make about
what is most important. The past
is recreated by each generation of historians.
Within
this epistemological approach to the philosophy of history we can distinguish
approaches that are, broadly speaking, more empiricist and more rationalist;
those that view the past as an ordinary object of empirical investigation,
versus those who view the past as an object of rational reconstruction and
understanding.
There
is a third important strand of thinking within the philosophy of history that
differs from both those surveyed to this point. On this approach, there is a bundle of middle-level
conceptual questions about the past, and the constitution of the past, that are
appropriately addressed by a philosophical perspective. What is causation in history? What is the role of the individual in
history? Is historical change
necessary or contingent? Does
history fall into discrete “periods” or “regions”? This set of questions bears some similarity to the first
approach (the metaphysical approach), in that it asks substantive questions
about historical structures and causes.
And it has something in common with the epistemological approach as
well, in that it is intended to shed light on the nature of the phenomena
concerning which we are attempting to arrive at beliefs or
interpretations. We might call
this approach one of “middle level metaphysics.”
The
approach that I am taking in this body of work asks abstract questions about
historical processes and historical knowledge, but it does not derive from the
research traditions of the traditional philosophy of history. Instead, it takes its inspiration from
the philosophy of science. I take
the view that historians are attempting to provide rationally justified
knowledge about the past. They are
interested in identifying “significant” historical events or outcomes (e.g. the
French Revolution, the outbreak of the American Civil War, the collapse of the
Qing Empire); giving realistic descriptions of these events; and answering
questions about the causes and effects of these events. The task of the philosophy of history
as I will pursue it is to analyze and assess the practice of outstanding
historians in order to uncover the assumptions they make about the goals of
historical inquiry, the ways in which evidence, theory, and inference can lead
to discoveries within historical disciplines; and to identify some of the
conceptual and methodological difficulties that arise in the practice of
historical investigation.
The
guiding intuition is that historians implicitly define the rationality and
objectivity of the discipline of historical knowledge; and philosophers can
elucidate (and criticize) that ensemble of assumptions about historical inquiry
and knowledge in a way that illuminates both the nature of historical knowledge
and the ways in which current approaches may be flawed or partial. In other words, the philosophy of
history can function as a conceptual enhancement for working historians, and it
can function as a source of rational criticism of specific methods or approaches
within contemporary historiography.
Some
of the questions I am interested in probing include—
· What is historical causation?
· Are there generalizations in
history?
· What range of interpretative
“under-determination” exists in historical inquiry?
· Is there such a thing as
“objective historical knowledge” or “factual historical knowledge”?
· What assumptions do historians
make about the nature of structures, entities, and processes in historical
phenomena (modes of production, economic systems, revolutions, riots, wars)?
· What is the relationship
between agency and structure in historical explanation?
· Is there an important role for
comparative method in historical inquiry (e.g. economic development in Western
Europe and East Asia)?
· Is there such a thing as
“historical necessity”? What would
this be?
· What is the scope of
contingency in historical change?
· Are there large recurring
factors in history that play an important explanatory role in many distinct
settings?
· Can we give a middle-range
description of the logic of historical assertions and inquiry?
· What is history—a stream
of events, a set of interlocking processes, a narrative, a set of actors with
overlapping influences?
· What is a historical process?
There
is a body of work in history and historical sociology in which it is possible
to identify the strands of a new paradigm of historical inquiry—what
might be called “meso-history.”
This work provides examples of strong, innovative macro-explanations
that give more compelling and nuanced expression to this approach to
historiography than past macro-history. I characterize this paradigm as “conjunctural contingent
meso-history” (CCM), and I argue that this approach allows for a middle way
between grand theory and excessively particularistic narrative (Little 2000); http://www-personal.umd.umich.edu/~delittle/v2.PDF. This approach highlights three large ideas:
· Conjunctural: many independent factors
converge in bringing about specific historical outcomes
· Contingent: outcomes are not determined;
agency, structure, and circumstance combine to give rise to the outcome
· Meso-level: not grand history, not
localistic; but at an intermediate level of comparison and contrast
The
paradigm recognizes historical contingency—at any given juncture there
are multiple outcomes that might have occurred. It recognizes the role of agency—leaders, inventors,
engineers, activists, and philosophers are able to influence the course of
development in particular historical contexts. It recognizes the multiplicity
of causes that are at work in almost all historical settings—thereby
avoiding the mono-causal assumptions of much previous macro-history. And it
recognizes, finally, that there are discernible structures, processes, and
constraints that recur in various historical settings and that play a causal
role in the direction and pace of change.
It is therefore an important part of the historian’s task to identify
these structures and trace out the ways in which they constrain and motivate
individuals in particular settings, leading to outcomes that can be explained
as contingent results of conjunctural historical settings. This approach
recognizes an important role for social theory within the historian’s practice,
while at the same time emphasizing that the notion of historical inquiry as no
more than applied social theory is one that trivializes the problems of
explanation and interpretation that confront the working historian.
Bianco, Lucien. 2001. Peasants
without the Party : Grass-Root Movements in Twentieth-Century China. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe.
Bloch,
Marc Léopold Benjamin. 1964. Feudal Society, Phoenix Books, P156-P157. [Chicago]: University of
Chicago Press.
———.
1966. French Rural History; an Essay on Its Basic Characteristics. Berkeley,: University of
California Press.
Brass,
Paul, ed. 1985. Ethnic Groups and the State. London: Croom Helm.
Carr,
Edward Hallett. 1962. What Is History? [1st American ] ed, The George Macaulay
Trevelyan Lectures, 1961. New York,: Knopf.
Elster,
Jon. 1983. Explaining Technical Change : A Case Study in the Philosophy of
Science, Studies
in Rationality and Social Change. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] ; New York; Oslo:
Cambridge University Press ; Universitetsforlaget.
Fagan,
Brian M. 2000. The Little Ice Age : How Climate Made History 1300-1850. New York: Basic Books.
Gallie,
W. B. 1964. Philosophy and the Historical Understanding. New York: Schocken Books.
Gardiner,
Patrick L. 1952. The Nature of Historical Explanation. London: Oxford University
Press.
———.
1974. The Philosophy of History, Oxford Readings in Philosophy. London ; New York: Oxford
University Press.
Hacking,
Ian. 1999. The Social Construction of What? Cambridge: Harvard University
Press.
Hardin,
Russell. 1995. One for All: The Logic of Group Conflict. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Hegel,
G. W. F. 1975. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated by H. B. Nisbet.
Vol. Cambridge University Press. 1975: Cambridge.
Hook,
Sidney. 1955. The Hero in History; a Study in Limitation and Possibility. Boston: Beacon Press.
Horowitz,
Donald L. 1985. Ethnic Groups in Conflict. Berkeley, California: University of
California Press.
Little,
Daniel. 1989. Marxism and Popular Politics: The Microfoundations of Class
Struggle. Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 15:163-204.
———.
1994. Microfoundations of Marxism. In Readings in the Philosophy of Social Science, edited by M. Martin and L.
McIntyre. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
———.
1998. Microfoundations, Method and Causation: On the Philosophy of the
Social Sciences. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers.
———.
2000. Explaining Large-Scale Historical Change. Philosophy of the Social
Sciences 30
(1):89-112.
Montesquieu,
Charles de Secondat, Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold Stone. 1989. The
Spirit of the Laws, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge ; New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Montesquieu,
Charles de Secondat, and David Lowenthal. 1965. Considerations on the Causes
of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline. New York: Free Press.
Moore,
Jr., Barrington. 1978. Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt . White Plains, NY: Sharpe.
Moya,
Paula M. L., and Michael Roy Hames-Garcia, eds. 2000. Reclaiming Identity :
Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism. Berkeley, Calif.: University
of California Press.
Nash,
Manning. 1989. The Cauldron of Ethnicity in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Netting,
Robert McC. 1993. Smallholders, Householders: Farm Families and the Ecology
of Intensive, Sustainable Agriculture. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Scott,
James C. 1976. The Moral Economy of the Peasant : Rebellion and Subsistence
in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Press.
———.
1985. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
———.
1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Sverrisson,
Árni. 2002. Small Boats and Large Ships: Social Continuity and Technical Change
in the Icelandic Fisheries, 1800-1960. Technology and Culture 43 (2):227-254-3.
Tambiah,
Stanley J. 1991. Sri Lanka: Ethnic Fratricide and the Dismantling of Democracy. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Thompson,
E. P. 1966. The Making of the English Working Class, Vintage Books, V-322. New York,: Vintage Books.
———.
1971. The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century . Past
and Present 50:71-136.
———.
1991. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture. New York: The New Press.
Tilly,
Charles. 1964. The Vendée. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
———.
1986. The Contentious French: Four Centuries of Popular Struggle. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Turner,
Stephen P. 1994. The Social Theory of Practices : Tradition, Tacit
Knowledge, and Presuppositions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Varshney,
Ashutosh. 2002. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life : Hindus and Muslims in India. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press.
Walsh,
W. H. 1968. Philosophy of History: An Introduction. 3d rev. ed, Harper
Torchbooks, L020. New York,: Harper & Row.
Weber,
Max. 1949. The Methodology of the Social Sciences. New York: Free Press.
———.
1975. Roscher and Knies : The Logical Problems of Historical Economics. New York: Free Press.
———.
1977. Critique of Stammler. New York: Free Press.
White,
Morton Gabriel. 1969. Foundations of Historical Knowledge. Vol. TB1440, Harper
Torchbooks.
New York: Harper & Row.
[1] See Stephen Turner’s treatment of social practices (Turner
1994) for a valuable philosophical exploration of the concept.
[2] See my “Marxism and Popular Politics: The Microfoundations of Class Struggle” (Little 1998) for further discussion of this
issue.
[3] All have been presented at sessions of the Social
Science History Association: “Explaining Largescale Historical Change,” Social Science History
Association, Fort Worth, November, 1999; “Historical Concepts, Social Ontology,
Macrohistory,” Social Science History Association, Pittsburgh, October, 2000;
“Causation in Meso-History,” Social Science History Association, Chicago,
November 2001; “Transportation as a Large Historical Factor,” Social Science
History Association, St. Louis, October 2002.