Why and How to read Why?

Abstract

Charles Tilly has surprised us again. It was enough of a surprise when the veteran analyst of political conflict and change published a major book on inequality (Durable Inequality, 1998) and then started writing about identities (Stories, Identities, and Political Change, 2002). But now he has entirely shifted the scale and style of his analysis. Although an experienced Tilly reader will not be surprised to find engaging vignettes and vivid comparisons, even I did not expect him to present such a remarkable tour of small-scale social processes in a conversational mode. Who would have expected to find so many of the topics made famous by Erving Goffman, Kenneth Burke, and Jerome Bruner in a Tilly book? Why? uses a simple scheme to survey how and why people offer explanations, excuses, justifications, and accounts. It makes a compelling case for reason giving as a way of creating, maintaining, transforming, or terminating interpersonal relations. It lays out its arguments cheerfully, clearly, and without fanfare, illustrating from an extraordinary range of material including stories from Tilly’s own life. The brief account of his re-reading Anatole Broyard’s Intoxicated by My Illness while he (Tilly) was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer, for example, comes first as a shock and then as an illumination. Perhaps we should have seen it coming. Over the last ten years or so, Tilly has talked repeatedly about “tunneling under the post-modern challenge.” By that he means a twostep process. First, we must recognize that a great deal of social construction goes into the formation of entities—groups, institutions, markets, selves—that most people take for granted as real. But then, he insists, instead of stopping there social scientists must go on to explain how that construction actually works and produces its effects. Elsewhere he has written about this problem extensively in terms of epistemology, ontology, and social scientific method. Except for some intriguing discussions of Aristotle on poetics and rhetoric, however, Tilly almost entirely avoids formal encounters with theory and method in Why?. He makes his arguments lightly, illustrates them brightly, then moves on to the next point. Since I learned English as a third language, I am probably more sensitive than most native English speakers to the way people write English prose. American academics often dismay