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Copyright
c 2000 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved

HOW DO RELATIONS STORE HISTORIES?

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

?
For most of us, alas, crucial moments in a lifetime of inquiry involve discov-
Annu. Rev. Sociol. 2000.26:721-723. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

eries that we have been asking the wrong questions. Any effort to lay the burden of
our ignorance on the next generation of researcherswhich is, after all, the point
of the present exercisewill therefore serve chiefly to make members of that gen-
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eration feel superior. Visibly violating the interest of my future reputation, let me
ask out loud a deeply bothersome question: how do relations store histories? How
does interaction among social locations both constrain subsequent interactions and
alter the relations involved?
My question concerns relations among social locationsnot just persons but
also jobs, organizations, communities, networks, and other such sites, just so long
as they include some distinguishing properties and coordinating structure. It rests
on the assumption that individuals as such do not constitute the bedrock of social
life, 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 interaction
within a given relation transform that relation? Examples of relevant processes in-
clude changes in contentious repertoires, shifts in the content and form of conversa-
tion, alterations of rights or obligations, and moves of a pair between war and peace:
In the case of contentious repertoires, relations between claimants and
objects of claims (e.g. peasants and landlords, workers and bosses) mostly
change incrementally, but as they do so claim-making strategies, mutual
definitions, voiced grievances, and stories told about past relations all
change as well. How and why does that happen? Exactly how, for example,
did the political demonstration whose routines are now so familiar to
militants and television viewers evolve from Western European petition
marches and military displays of the late eighteenth century?
In the case of conversation, people draw on previous interchanges with the
same interlocutors, improvise within limits set by shared understandings,
convey the character of their relationship through talk, yet transform the
relationship as they do so. How and why does that happen? Precisely what
processes, for example, go on as one friend solicits and gets effective advice
on a risky choice from another friend, or as two competing groups of
engineers within a firm work out a compromise proposal for presentation to

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722 TILLY

management? In what ways do those processes depend on histories

of the relationships in question?
Rights and obligations consist of enforceable claims connecting social
sitesindividual or otherwise. Although participants in rights and
obligations sometimes write contracts or constitutions, most of the time
they create bit-by-bit redefinitions of the enforceable claims in question.
How and why does that happen? Through what interactions and appeals to

?
memory, for example, do companies of soldiers and their officers work out
the limits on what each can demand of the other?
War and peace name extreme positions on a continuum of relations
between political units running from 1) outright mutual destruction by
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means of organized armed force to 2) coexistence without collective strife.

No war between two powers precisely mimics its predecessor, yet the
history of relations between the parties strongly constrains the current
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round of conflict. How and why does that happen? To what extent and how,
for example, does accumulated knowledge of their relationship affect how
leaders of Israel and Syria shift among open warfare, mutual harassment,
proxy battles, and uneasy peace?
Bad answers beckon. The first bad answer, quite popular these days, declares
that experience of interaction alters individual consciousness, either by changing
means-end calculations or by adjusting the link between feeling and memory. The
answer is bad because it begs the question: How do pairs or larger sets of actors
actually create and change shared understandings in the form of recognizable
claim-making performances, dialects, bodies of law, and diplomacy?
A second bad answer used to be much more popular, but has lost much of
its appeal in recent decades. The answer: Society does it. The answer is doubly
bad because it invokes a dubious agent and fails to state how or why that agent
accomplishes its transformative work.
A third bad answer declares that culture, as the repository of collective expe-
rience, embeds histories in relations. The answer is even worse than the first two
because it combines their defects. It begs the question of how culturethat is,
shared understandings and their representationschanges as it invokes a dubious
agent and fails to specify how that agent creates effects in social life.
Astonished by my ignorance, students of conversation, strong interaction, sym-
bolic interaction, collective memory, and cultural evolution will no doubt claim
that they have already provided superior accounts of how relations store histories.
To them I reply in advance: show us. My own attempts to adapt accounts in those
fields to contentious repertoires, rights, and war have so far yielded tantalizing
suggestions, but no persuasive answers. Most of them incorporate one version or
another of the three bad answers.
Good answers? If I really knew, I wouldnt be writing this essay. For the sake
of stimulating argument, let me nevertheless identify two paths that seem worth
exploring. We might call them creative interaction and cultural ecology.
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HOW DO RELATIONS STORE HISTORIES 723

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, individual dexterity, knowledge,
and disciplined preparation generally yield superior play, yet the rigid equivalent
of military drill destroys the enterprise. Both jazz and soccer, when well exe-
cuted, proceed through improvised interaction, surprise, incessant error and error-
correction, alternation between solo and ensemble action, and repeated responses
to understandings shared by at least pairs of players. After the fact, participants

?
and spectators create shared stories of what happened, and striking improvisa-
tions shape future performances. If we could explain how human beings bring off
such improvisatory adventures, we could be well on our way to accounting for
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how relations store histories in contentious repertoires, conversation, rights and

obligations, war and peace, and similar phenomena.
Cultural ecology? Social life consists of transactions among social sites, some
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of them occupied by individual persons, but most of them occupied by shifting

aspects or clusters of persons. None of the sites, goes the reasoning, contains all
the cultureall the shared understandingson which transactions in its vicinity
draw. But transactions among sites produce interdependence among extensively
connected sites, deposit related cultural material in those sites, transform shared
understandings in the process, and thus make large stores of culture available to
any particular site through its connections with other sites. Relations store histories
in this dispersed way.
Neither the creative interaction nor the cultural ecology path is necessarily
inconsistent with the genetic, evolutionary, and neurophysiological accounts of
human social life that will surely loom much larger in sociologists thinking during
the next few decades than they have during the twentieth century. In fact, if genetic,
evolutionary, or neurophysiological theorists would take the storage of histories
by relations seriously, they might supply the breakthrough that has so far eluded
workaday sociologists.

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 Annual Review of Sociology
Volume 26, 2000

CONTENTS
COHABITATION IN THE UNITED STATES: An Appraisal of
Research Themes, Findings, and Implications, Pamela J. Smock 1
DOUBLE STANDARDS FOR COMPETENCE: Theory and Research,
Martha Foschi 21
THE CHANGING NATURE OF DEATH PENALTY DEBATES,
Michael L. Radelet, Marian J. Borg 43
WEALTH INEQUALITY IN THE UNITED STATES, Lisa A. Keister,
Stephanie Moller 63
CRIME AND DEMOGRAPHY: Multiple Linkages, Reciprocal Relations,
Scott J. South, Steven F. Messner 83
ETHNICITY AND SEXUALITY, Joane Nagel 107
PREJUDICE, POLITICS, AND PUBLIC OPINION: Understanding the
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Sources of Racial Policy Attitudes, Maria Krysan 135

RACE AND RACE THEORY, Howard Winant 169
STATES AND MARKETS IN AN ERA OF GLOBALIZATION, Sen
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Riain 187
VOLUNTEERING, John Wilson 215
HOW WELFARE REFORM IS AFFECTING WOMEN''S WORK, Mary
Corcoran, Sandra K. Danziger, Ariel Kalil, Kristin S. Seefeldt
241

FERTILITY AND WOMEN''S EMPLOYMENT IN INDUSTRIALIZED

NATIONS, Karin L. Brewster, Ronald R. Rindfuss 271
POLITICAL SOCIOLOGICAL MODELS OF THE U.S. NEW DEAL,
Jeff Manza 297
THE TREND IN BETWEEN-NATION INCOME INEQUALITY, Glenn
Firebaugh 323
NONSTANDARD EMPLOYMENT RELATIONS: Part-time, Temporary
and Contract Work, Arne L. Kalleberg 341
SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF IDENTITIES, Judith A. Howard 367
SCHOOLS AND COMMUNITIES: Ecological and Institutional
Dimensions, Richard Arum 395
RACIAL AND ETHNIC VARIATIONS IN GENDER-RELATED
ATTITUDES, Emily W. Kane 419
MULTILEVEL MODELING FOR BINARY DATA, Guang Guo,
Hongxin Zhao 441
A SPACE FOR PLACE IN SOCIOLOGY, Thomas F. Gieryn 463
WEALTH AND STRATIFICATION PROCESSES, Seymour Spilerman
497
THE CHOICE-WITHIN-CONSTRAINTS NEW INSTITUTIONALISM
AND IMPLICATIONS FOR SOCIOLOGY, Paul Ingram, Karen Clay
525
POVERTY RESEARCH AND POLICY FOR THE POST-WELFARE
ERA, Alice O'Connor 547
CLOSING THE ""GREAT DIVIDE"": New Social Theory on Society
and Nature, Michael Goldman, Rachel A. Schurman 563
SOCIALISM AND THE TRANSITION IN EAST AND CENTRAL
EUROPE: The Homogeneity Paradigm, Class, and Economic , Linda
Fuller 585
 FRAMING PROCESSES AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS: An Overview
and Assessment, Robert D. Benford, David A. Snow 611
FEMINIST STATE THEORY: Applications to Jurisprudence,
Criminology, and the Welfare State, Lynne A. Haney 641
PATHWAYS TO ADULTHOOD IN CHANGING SOCIETIES:
Variability and Mechanisms in Life Course Perspective, Michael J.
Shanahan 667
A SOCIOLOGY FOR THE SECOND GREAT TRANSFORMATION,
Michael Burawoy 693
AGENDA FOR SOCIOLOGY AT THE START OF THE TWENTY-
FIRST CENTURY, Michael Hechter 697
WHAT I DON'T KNOW ABOUT MY FIELD BUT WISH I DID,
Douglas S. Massey 699
FAMILY, STATE, AND CHILD WELL-BEING, Sara McLanahan 703
GETTING IT RIGHT: SEX AND RACE INEQUALITY IN WORK
ORGANIZATIONS, Barbara F. Reskin 707
WHITHER THE SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF CRIME, Robert J.
Sampson 711
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ON GRANULARITY, Emanuel Schegloff 715

HOW DO RELATIONS STORE HISTORIES?, Charles Tilly 721
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