Author: Sahan S. Karatasli

Isaac A. Reed & Paul Lichterman

Let’s say you are advising, or writing, a three-case study dissertation. You want the dissertation to be welcome scholarly news. That usually means it makes a causal argument with comparisons. You also are alive to the criticisms of approaches that define comparison cases as collections of factors or variables.

What do you do?  Our paper proposes a novel answer that draws on pragmatist epistemology and social philosophy, and ethnographic research procedures. This short summary focuses on our approach to defining cases, and theorizing and justifying case comparisons, and then ends with the briefest mention of normative criteria in selecting cases. The paper illustrates our approach with Reed’s research on the Salem witch trials and the Whiskey Rebellion in the US.

Historians and ethnographers potentially share an orientation to chains of meaningful action that emerge in relation to problems. Actors conceive, often change, their ends in view depending on their encounters with problems. Chains of action unfold across time and space, crisscrossing between collective and individual actors. Custom, habit, creativity and reflexivity all play a part in the unfolding action. Of the perhaps innumerable chains, which do we choose to interpret? And which do we compare in order to arrive at an interpretive explanation?

We propose that historical sociologists embrace this scenario of action, and we offer a pragmatist approach to the problem of which actions to interpret and compare. It is indebted to John Dewey and his notion of “conduct”—meaning social action that occurs somewhere on the arc between reflexive understanding and habit. Making the historical sociologist an investigator of conduct opens up challenges but also possibilities that we would lose with a current, deservedly prominent approach.

We call that approach “causal combinatorics.” A category of approaches really, it draws on set theory to formalize comparative method in the interest of causal analysis. This line of research includes Qualitative Comparative Analysis, and important work by our fellow panelists. Work in this category uses cases to represent different combinations of elements or factors that do or don’t work, in experimental time, to produce outcomes of interest: fascism or no fascism, for example. The focus is on combinations of qualities or factors, not average effects of linear correlations taken as causes. This approach bids us produce medium-N research design, not small-N. And that’s not a bad way to write a dissertation, or an award-winning mature work!

The causal combinatorics approach has been one of many different approaches to the fine line between history and sociology. Another conversation that has taken place concerning the relationship between history and sociology has been focused on events and temporality. Causal combinatorics itself considered temporality through concepts such as path-dependence and critical events. Others have plied a more interpretive approach, asking how events are cognized as events by the actors involved, while events are happening. For example, Abbott advocates for a concept of duration—referring to an experience of time that is holistic—-using the metaphor of a musical phrase to capture this. In contrast to Abbott, but also outside the causal combinatorics frame, Sewell has advocated “eventful time” in contrast to “experimental time.” In his view, precisely because events transform the basic rules of the game of social life, events also render causality temporally heterogeneous.

For us, the turn to events and temporality has two implications. First, these works invite a larger reorientation toward action, interaction and interpretation as a process. And second, they reintroduce the problem of comparisons in the service of causal analysis—even if Abbott’s perspective seems to shift away from that enterprise. That means we are back to looking for relevant counterfactual cases, since we don’t determine the relevant counterfactuals from a table of factor-combinations (searching the historical record for a given combination). Of course, we could just foreswear comparisons. But do we really tell colleagues and students not to do comparison?

We propose a different justification for comparisons, a pragmatist historical sociology of conduct that imbibes the spirit of ‘taking action on its own terms’ while maintaining the comparative causal enterprise. Let’s come back, then, to a typical three-case study dissertation. In the causal combinatorics mode, each case is a different, independent collection of factors. The investigator supposes these different collections have led to different outcomes of the same class of event–revolution or no revolution, for example.

Our approach defines and relates cases differently. Each case is an end in itself (a problem of interpretive explanation for the investigator). Each is also a means to solving the problem of explanation in the other cases. The investigator defines cases in terms of different sequences of meaningful action — rather than in terms of similar/different outcomes. The investigator conceives the different action sequences as different iterations of a shared conceptual category, not different collections of variables. These mutually informing cases constitute a triangle, a “mini-world” of interpretation and explanation. Our approach involves four aspects: theoretical casing; comparison by way of “theoretical translation”; critical-reflexive judgments by a community of inquiry; and (occasionally) the use of normative counterfactuals.

Casing. For ethnographers, including historical ethnographers (for example, Glaeser, 2011), the challenge is to case the chains of meaningful action in a way that honors and juggles the actors’ meanings and the investigator’s meanings (Lichterman and Reed 2015). We don’t want to uncritically adopt actors’ categories as our own terms of analysis. Yet actors’ meanings of course are integral to meaningful chains of action. We have to ask, as ethnographers do: “What do we have a case of?” In order to case our historical observations on the French Revolution, for example, typically we would draw on theories of revolution and say we have a case of a particular kind of revolution. But a theory of revolution usually is a theory of a class of outcomes; the revolution happens or doesn’t happen, or ends in dictatorship or democracy.

Our method, in contrast, starts with a conceptual casing that admits of meaningful action. We want to have cases of unfolding conduct, and then follow conduct toward eventual outcomes, rather than starting with outcomes—as in a theory of revolution-—and looking back, combing the empirical record with preselected factors taken from theories of revolution. That method usually truncates meaningful action. So we have to tack back and forth between a sociological concept of action and the acts and actors’ meanings we have observed. This is the core hermeneutic process leading to interpretive explanation in historical sociology.

Comparison through theoretical translation. Conceptualization and comparison work together with casing. In our approach, causal claims are contrastive. We ask a “why question”: Why did some series or “duration” of linked actions unfold, instead of a series that could have transpired but didn’t? The comparison cases in our mini-world of investigation are contrasts, just as they are in ethnographic studies that follow analytic induction.  We “translate” cases into theoretical terms that admit of situated action—whether the “situation” is of the sort Goffman studied, or rather Geertz. Reed’s (2016) comparison of the Whiskey Rebellion and the Salem Witch Trials illustrates these first two aspects of our method.

While a rebellion is not a witch-hunt, Reed compared the episodes as cases of a conceptual category: the coherence of an ideological response to “unsettled times.” Reed found in Salem ample evidence of an uncertain situation, in which a group of ministers could use the power of coherent rhetoric to make their interpretation of the situation convincing. The why-question emerged: Why did the Whiskey Rebellion not seem to go this way? The Whiskey rebels had access to a coherent, millenarian worldview, but their speeches and other communications conveyed incoherence, humor, nervousness—not the grinding seriousness of Cotton Mather. Having translated the casing concept across both cases, Reed took the 1692 Salem case as the counterfactual comparison for the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion, and vice versa. Each was cased with the same conceptual category, assisting the other’s ability to address the question of how historical actors render action into a coherent story in times of crisis.

Following this lead, Reed discerned in the Whiskey Rebellion a series of varyingly coherent interpretations, rather than a preponderance of explicit, coherent worldviews as were articulated in Salem. The Whiskey Rebellion thematized grievances and social conflict, without resolving them in an overarching, dominant interpretation. Understood this way, the Whiskey Rebellion case shed more light on Salem. Again, cases illuminate each other. While the Whiskey Rebellion was a site of varied interpretations—a thematization of extant conflict—the Salem Witch Trials, in contrast, were a site of “fetishization” of scapegoats (accused women), opening a gap between the conflicts and the terms in which actors interpreted them. So Reed theorized two formats of rhetorical struggle—thematization and fetishization in unsettled times.  But how did Reed know which comparisons to select?

The community of inquiry. Put compactly, both C.S. Peirce and John Dewey argued that adequate knowledge claims emerge only in critical-reflexive dialogue with a community of inquiry that assesses the empirical worth of claims and the claims’ ability to generate further inquiry. Contemporary Deweyan and feminist epistemologists would point out those communities—disciplinary, sub-disciplinary or trans-disciplinary—rest to some degree on conventional relevance criteria for “a good question” or “a good comparison.” These criteria keep the community focused on shared concerns—but may also induce some tunnel vision. Sometimes, the researcher has reason to try reorienting the community’s dominant approaches to its shared research concerns; we call that meta-communicative dialogue. In this case, the community’s concern is how to conceptualize crisis. Is it a historical conjuncture of organizational and institutional dynamics, or a state of feeling that elicits in different actors various kinds of action and uses of culture? Reed’s discussion of thematization and fetishization was an attempt to re-orient some of the community’s dialogue about crisis times. Finally, and very provisionally:

Enter the normative? Communities of inquiry sometimes engage practical or “normative,” questions, as Dewey knew. A classic example is “why no socialism in the US?” Our paper considers the use of comparisons and theoretical translations that derive not only from other chains of historical action, but from normative aspirations about how action could have unfolded.

 Consider Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Du Bois compares the trajectories of the nineteenth century Black and White worker, and in turn makes comparisons with European, especially British working-class politics. He also compared with a normative counterfactual case of “what might have happened.” That was the possibility that proponents of universal suffrage and advocates of subordinated labor could have united in a democratic front to challenge racialized capitalism.  DuBois analyzed incipient efforts to unite white and black workers, actual instances of black suffrage before the end of Reconstruction, as well as the post-civil war political ambitions of abolition advocates.

Our paper discusses how contrasts drawn from normative questions can be subject to the same critical-reflexive scrutiny as other contrasts.  A community that is ready to critically examine cases inspired by normative causal questions, rather than assume those questions aren’t operating, is one that is more ready to identify normative blinders in case and concept selection. Under these conditions, comparisons in the service of normative questions may be generative for future inquiry.

References

Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. 1935. Black reconstruction in America: An essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. Vol. 6. New York: Oxford University Press.

Glaeser, Andreas. 2011. Political Epistemics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lichterman, Paul and Isaac Reed. 2015. “Theory and Contrastive Explanation in Ethnography.” Sociological  Methods and Research 44(4):585-635.

Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2016. “Between structural breakdown and crisis action: Interpretation in the Whiskey Rebellion  and the Salem Witch Trials.” Critical Historical Studies. 3(1): 27-64.

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019.

Anna Skarpelis

History is produced from what the archive offers – Marisa J. Fuentes

If history is indeed produced from what the archive offers, sociologists need to better understand the epistemological implications surrounding the collection, analysis and interpretation of archival documents—the process of “production of knowledge about social life” (Reed 2010: 20). Records and archives are part of a life cycle that ranges from record creation to record keeping and record display and end in their deployment in scholars’ analyses, and yet historical sociology has remained comparatively silent on both the precise nature of these archival objects, as well as on the implications of their genesis, preservation and archivization for our scholarly practice. I do not suggest, as Paul Rabinow did about ethnographic writing thirty years ago, that historical sociology is in crisis; rather, my intervention targets comparative historical sociological (CHS) research methodologies and practices, and suggests ways in which scholars can be more epistemologically conscious when reconstructing the past (Rabinow 1986). Just like ethnographers reflect on site choice and demographers submit their data and analyses to robustness checks, historical comparative sociologists ought to interrogate their records. My aim here is to connect documentary production to archivization and scholarly interpretation, and to ask how taking this relationship seriously affects comparative historical sociological work as well as sociological theorizing.

“Archivization produces as much as it records the event” (Manoff 2004: 12), and hence unpacking the material bases of documents is critical, particularly in comparative research. Archival bodies become a tool for better understanding the relationship between history, technology, the archive and its interpretation. This holds relevance beyond our subfield: It speaks to organizational sociology by treating the creation of documentary reality as an organizational and thus traceable and legible process; to cultural sociology by unboxing how the meanings we can recover are contingent on specific power structures, organizational processes and the agency of professional archivists; to historical comparative sociology by providing a framework to think about comparison of distinct datasets; and to mainstream sociology in advancing how we can think about what it means to conduct robust research, as archival bodies can help us dispel the illusion of false necessity.

Archival Bodies as Epistemology, or: Subjectivity in the Archive

An epistemology of the archive has to consider the archive as a field in itself, a space for the production of historical knowledge, rather than seeing archival work simply as a form of fieldwork that extracts evidence or works on the basis of found objects. Framing the question of archival bodies around epistemological concerns allows addressing questions of positionality, subjectivity and a pluralism of meaning structures, thus productively melding the literatures of standpoint theory within sociology, memory studies within history, and postcolonialism within anthropology. In sociology, standpoint theory has dealt with the impact of positionality most urgently. Patricia Hill Collins best described distinct epistemologies as localized, partial and situated forms of knowledge, and makes sense of how some epistemologies have historically trumped others: “Far from being the apolitical study of truth, epistemology points to the ways in which power relations shape who is believed and why” (Hill Collins 2015: 252). In history, concerns about power and the archive are localized in the field of memory studies. Scrutinizing lieux de mémoire means untangling practices of generating history, means understanding the ‘structuring of forgetfulness’ (Nora 1997: 4; Rousso 1994: 4). Both perspectives overlap with anthropological and postcolonial engagements with the archive that ask us to see state actors as “cultural agents of ‘fact’ production” and that caution scholars to engage an ethnographic, rather than purely extractive, ways with the archive (Stoler 2002; Stoler 2010).

Archival Bodies as Theory

The relationship between theory and comparative historical sociology has been a fraught one, with the ‘death of theory’ proclaimed at regular intervals, just to be refuted in due course (Quadagno and Knapp 1992; Sewell 2005). In Event Catalogs as Theories, Charles Tilly asserted that “all social research rests (…) [on] two theories: a theory explaining the phenomenon under study, another theory explaining the generation of evidence concerning the phenomenon” (Tilly 2002: 248). The recovery of traces, our observation of them and the reconstruction of the original phenomena hence become a question of theory. Analogously, I argue that epistemological considerations – epistemology defined here as issues pertaining to “the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry” (Steup 2017) – around archives fall as much under the purview of sociological theory as they do under the purview of research methods.

Tilly set out three questions scholars should ask about the generation of evidence in order to explain phenomena: 1) How does the phenomenon of interest leave traces? 2) How can a researcher elicit or observe these traces? And 3) how can we reconstruct whatever is of interest of the phenomenon (cause/effect)? Here, I deploy the term archival bodies to set out a partially analogous argument about epistemology in archival research and illustrate what is at stake with examples from my own historical archival fieldwork into racialization processes of the mid-20th century German National Socialist and the Japanese authoritarian regimes. Archival bodies thus denote processes of knowledge construction and organization around the recovery, reconstruction and depiction of events, processes and persons on three levels:

1. The creation of documentary evidence from social life by persons and organizations, i.e. the turning of a person into a record, an archival body in the singular [establishing what is a trace, or identifying appropriate data];
2. The construction of sets of files into a body of records, an archival body made up of a plethora of files, by archiving professionals working in organizations dedicated to the preservation and archiving of records who have their own archival projects in mind [data collection, and archivization];
3. The recovery of persons from an institutionally preserved archival body by the researcher [transcending the ‘mere record’ through subjectivity reconstruction and interpretation].

Archival bodies are corporeal in the double sense: First, they denote how researchers draw together a corpus, or bodies of material, for analysis; second, they are birth-giving in that they govern how a person can emerge in and through archival documentation. Both are decisively important for the reconstruction of events, but more importantly, for that of subjectivities: How are lives partially pre-narrated through modalities of the record? How do the files themselves act? Questions of personhood and agency are crucial to most sociological analyses even at the macro-historical level, and yet we spend little time reflecting on how the material we draw on contributes to shaping the characters that materialize in our narratives. Archival bodies allow for a more cautious reassembly of historical lives while taking seriously both the individual subjectivities of those captured in the records, as well as the organizational and historical prerogatives shaping the fixing of life on file. The paper this excerpt is based on—which I will submit as part of an invited issue on the sociology of archives curated by Andrew Deener and Claudio Benzecry for Qualitative Sociology later this term—illustrates the argument empirically with examples from my own dissertation fieldwork on racial classification in the multi-ethnic annexationist empires that were Germany and Japan, collected over three years in roughly a dozen archives on three continents.

Archival Bodies in History

Bodies are acted upon when traces are left on paper; this is not merely a figurative observation. In the National Socialist regime’s use of archives, being found in the archive could be advantageous if you wanted to prove Aryan status, and not being found could be detrimental; on the other hand, being recorded in religious registers could spell deportation and death (Adler 1974; Majer 2003). Perversely then, the giving of life—by creating a record that was preserved in the archives—could also lead to the taking of life, for those whose existence had been tallied on paper for deportation and murder.

The file is “the most despised of all ethnographic objects” and yet may be the object closest to recording social action of the historical past: Files are “closest to the presence of speech” in “the imagined chain of replacements for the spoken language, supplements” (Latour 1986: 26; Vismann 2008: 8). Dorothy E. Smith refers to the phenomenon of treating the text as internally determined structure of meaning as document time: An instance in which the text becomes fixed as a social accomplishment (Smith 1974). This fixing of people and processes through “routine textually-mediated practices of people engaged in their daily activities” of course leaves us with a curtailed record of interaction (Cahill 1998: 143; Kameo and Whalen 2015: 210); but in their proximity to quotidian action, files also unwittingly record additional information, and the physical scars they bear of handling and use—marginalia, stamps, burn marks on the pages—allow insights into action a transcribed digital record no longer contains.

And yet, the relationship of truth between files and the social world they purport to record is a tense one. On the one hand, quod non est in actis, non est in mundo: this tenet of Roman Law, that what isn’t in the records, isn’t in the world condenses one of the fundamental epistemological and cultural sociological challenges facing historical comparativists – that of dealing with questions of state power in determining what is kept in the archive, of whose stories are told (Taeger 2002). If Nazi killings and Japanese colonial atrocities are less frequently recorded than observations of genealogical presence, this is a sign of power, and not of an absence of the phenomenon in question. Foucault described the archive as a “‘system of discursivity’ that establish[ed] the possibility of what can be said” (Manoff 2004: 18). Even a strong interest in population control does not necessarily lead to the population appearing in the archive in detail: In Dispossessed Lives, Fuentes retells how the only ‘voice’ she could find of the enslaved women of 18th century Bridgetown, Barbados, was reference to their screams in court records and accounts by abolitionists. Screams, she writes, became “the historical genre of the enslaved in the colonial archive” (Fuentes 2016: 143). While historians and sociologists can read the archive against the bias grain, as Fuentes suggests, the files themselves in their accessibility and usage are already imbued with meaning. Archives are not “an objective representation of the past, but rather [as] a selection of objects that have been preserved for a variety of reasons (…). These objects cannot provide direct and unmediated access to the past” (Manoff 2004: 14). They move through the world and in their interpretation by different actors, they become agents of collective memory, taking on vastly different meanings and use values depending on context. Rousso famously remarked that historical memory was structured forgetfulness (Rousso 1994). If forgetfulness is structured, so is remembrance: archival records are often selectively used, and contested files are read as representing the truth.

Even where records are plentiful, sociology as a field may refuse engagement – the expansion of sociology as a profession under National Socialism is an open secret in the history of German sociology that few acknowledge, and that others have made their life’s work at the cost of professional marginalization and their work being labeled ‘un-sociological’ (Christ and Suderland 2014; Klingemann 1996). In many ways, this mirrors American sociology’s failure to engage with the history of slavery more generally, and the American history of slavery in particular (Patterson 2018). Calling for a mindful form of subjectivity recovery of those treated poorly by history, but how differently should we write the history of perpetrators? And more generally, beyond asking ‘how should we read a source,’ what does a critical engagement with archival records look like?

Returning to Tilly’s search for reconstructing traces of real-life phenomena, we have to take account of the different types of archival bodies—first recorded in files and records, then selectively archived and ultimately interpreted by us—by adequately stripping them down to their historical and archival-organizational scaffolding. Quite apart from normative obligations to do right by the dead, the question of person recovery is also fundamentally ontological in nature. Craig Calhoun termed the danger inherent in seeing the archive as a record of ‘how it really was,’ rather than treating it as a potentially unreliable informant, the illusion of false necessity (Calhoun 2003). When confronted with her Stasi files, East German author Christa Wolf wrote that the “perverse mountain of files has turned into a kind of negative grail, to which one makes a pilgrimage in order to experience truth, judgment or absolution.” (Gitlin April 4, 1993). Forms of inquiry that take the archive as a fixed historical record, in which documents are taken in lieu of the ‘lost object’ and are used for “positivistic authentication and pseudo-scientific legitimization”, are problematic (Freshwater 2003: 730).

Archival Bodies in Sociological Practice

How does a person emerge through archival documentation? How do files act? What is preserved, why, and how accessible are the files? These questions surrounding archival bodies ought to be of particular concern to comparativists. After all, how can we engage in meaningful comparison when the organizations and contexts the person of interest is embedded in are so fundamentally different? Power and agency are inevitably bound up with one another in the archive: whether a person at all appears in the archive offers some cues about their status. Eastern European ethnic Germans appear in the German Federal Archives because the National Socialist (NS) regime had a strong interest in identifying and resettling this diaspora for purposes of ethnic cleansing; genealogical records that were mostly kept in church and city archives became a tool for implementing these racial policies. Being found in the archive could conversely also protect from this new form of violence, ranging from harassment to murder—if one could prove non-Jewishness through the Aryan Confirmation. In colonial Japan on the other hand, although colonial subjects were registered in ‘ethnic registries,’ the information contained within were much less multi-dimensional than the German archives, ostensibly because what was of interest to the Japanese state was a blanket ethnic designation. In practice, this left me with paper trails of up to one hundred pages per person for the German case, and little more than basic demographic data, tabulated in endless military booklets, on Japanese colonial subjects. That ethnic Germans emerge as much more three-dimensional characters through the files than ethnic Koreans do in Japanese archives has nothing to do with any characteristic pertaining to the persons we are seeking to reconstruct themselves, and everything to do with organizational practice, file creation and archival preferences and practices. The resulting differential availability in quantity of files does not mean that the Japanese were unconcerned about ‘racial fit,’ but that they in many cases drew blanket conclusions for entire populations.

If Pascal in Meditations espoused a materialist vision of archives, Walter Benjamin turned to a culturalist interpretation of remembering, “in which mental habits across time rather than physical things in the present are what bring the past into view, and in which specific heirs are necessary for the work of memorialization to succeed” (Fritzsche 2006: 185). It is the task of historical sociologists to recognize the contingency of files, without fearing that this responsible epistemological practice be misconstrued as casting a shadow over the robustness of our research. Recovering the person from the archive demands ‘transcending the mere record’ and justifies the sociological part of historical sociology in that we can productively draw on theory and comparison to construct our arguments (Calhoun 2003). Archival bodies one and two—how organizations put bodies onto file by pinning real life onto documentary reality, and the ways in which archives construct, preserve and make accessible documentation—both shape archival body three, or what type of person can emerge from the archive. If we think of authoritarian or colonial state records of subjected populations as partisan fragments, it becomes the task of the researcher to engage in acts of exposition, recovery and rehabilitation. It is our task to engage alternative interpretive devices and dislodge the historical genres already present in the archival record.

References

Adler, H. G. 1974. Der verwaltete Mensch : Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland. Tübingen: Mohr.
Cahill, Spencer E. 1998. “Toward a Sociology of the Person.” Sociological Theory 16(2):131-48.

Calhoun, Craig. 2003. “Afterword: Why Historical Sociology?” Pp. 383-93 in Handbook of Historical Sociology, edited by Gerard Delanty and Engin F. Isin. London: Sage.

Christ, Michaela, and Maja Suderland. 2014. Soziologie und Nationalsozialismus : Positionen, Debatten, Perspektiven. Berlin: Suhrkamp.

Freshwater, Helen. 2003. “The Allure of the Archive.” Poetics Today 24(4):729-58.
Fritzsche, Peter. 2006. “The Archive and the Case of the German Nation.” Pp. 184-208 in Archive stories facts, fictions, and the writing of history, edited by Antoinette M. Burton. Durham: Duke University Press.

Fuentes, Marisa J. 2016. Dispossessed lives : enslaved women, violence, and the archive: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.

Gitlin, Todd. April 4, 1993. “‘I Did Not Imagine That I Lived in Truth’.” in The New York Times.

Hill Collins, Patricia. 2015. Black feminist thought : knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment.

Kameo, Nahoko, and Jack Whalen. 2015. “Organizing Documents: Standard Forms, Person Production and Organizational Action.” Qualitative Sociology 38:205-29.

Klingemann, Carsten. 1996. Soziologie im Dritten Reich. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft.

Latour, Bruno. 1986. “Visualisation and Cognition: Drawing Things Together.” Pp. 1-40 in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present, edited by H. Kuklick: Jai Press.

Majer, Diemut. 2003. “Non-Germans” under the Third Reich: The Nazi judicial and administrative system in Germany and occupied Eastern Europe with special regard to occupied Poland, 1939-1945. Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Manoff, Marlene. 2004. “Theories of the archive from across the disciplines.” portal: Libraries & the Academy 4(1):9-25 17p.

Nora, Pierre. 1997. Les Lieux de Mémoire. Paris: Quarto Gallimard.

Patterson, Orlando. 2018. “American Sociology’s Denial of Slavery.” Trajectories – Newsletter of the ASA Comparative and Historical Sociology Section 30:17-23.

Quadagno, Jill, and Stan J. Knapp. 1992. “Have Historical Sociologists Forsaken Theory?: Thoughts on the History/Theory Relationship.” Sociological Methods & Research 20(4):481-507.

Rabinow, Paul. 1986. “Representations are social facts: modernity and post-modernity in anthropology.” Pp. 234-61 in Writing culture : the poetics and politics of ethnography : a School of American Research advanced seminar, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Reed, Isaac Ariail. 2010. “Epistemology Contextualized: Social-Scientific Knowledge in a Postpositivist Era.” Sociological Theory 28(1):20-39.

Rousso, Henri. 1994. The Vichy syndrome : history and memory in France since 1944. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Sewell, William H. 2005. Logics of history : social theory and social transformation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Smith, Dorothy E. 1974. “The Social Construction of Documentary Reality.” Sociological Inquiry 44(4):257-67.

Steup, Matthias. 2017. “Epistemology.” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/epistemology.

Stoler, Ann. 2002. “Colonial archives and the arts of governance.” Archival Science 2(1/2):87.
Stoler, Ann L. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Taeger, Angela. 2002. “Analysis of Records in Historical Research on Criminal Law. Criminal Records on Male Homosexuality in Paris in the 18th Century.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research: Qualitative Methods in Various Disciplines III: Criminology 3(1).

Tilly, Charles. 2002. “Event Catalogs as Theories.” Sociological Theory 20(2):248-54.

Vismann, Cornelia. 2008. Files: law and media technology. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019.

Armando Lara-Millán, Brian Sargent & Sunmin Kim

In this paper, we offer guidelines on how historical sociologists should engage with archives. Rather than focusing on the epistemological value of archival evidence—e.g. how we can generalize from a limited number of historical cases—we highlight the pragmatic aspects of doing historical sociology in archives: how do historical sociologists approach the material within archives? What sorts of materials should they look for while attempting to generate a theory? We argue that historical sociologists can benefit from thinking like an ethnographer. By specifying ethnographic dispositions, we lay out what it means to think like an ethnographer in archives.

Thinking Like an Ethnographer

When a historical sociologist goes into an archive, she may feel overwhelmed, for multiple reasons. First, it is difficult for the researcher to know which documents are relevant to the study. As soon as she gets into a relevant archive and opens up a storage box, she will discover that there is no folder labeled with her specific topic of interest. The challenge of identification can be overwhelming, especially for those who embark on their first archival project. Second, many individual documents simultaneously feel as if they contain one small part of the key to the puzzle and are also so trivial that they might not be worth attention. Each document may push the researcher in a small way, but collectively they can add up to something greater than their parts. Even after passing the hurdle of identification, a historical sociologist faces the challenge of weighting: what is important and what is not? Third, when faced with a large body of documents containing various ideas, behaviors, and value statements, separating what actors openly profess from what they truly believe is difficult. Actors can be duplicitous while attempting to persuade an audience in the course of making a decision. As Paul Willis (1981) demonstrated in his classic ethnography of working class youth in Britain, “penetrating” the minds of historical actors is always a difficult feat, even after correctly identifying and weighting all the relevant materials. Identifying the shortest path out of this maze becomes a key goal for the researcher. Researchers often move through these false starts and dead ends before finally reaching an effective and parsimonious theoretical explanation of complex historical phenomena.

These detours, we argue, are not just failed attempts at discovering the “right” kind of evidence, but valuable opportunities through which we can gain insights into the historical actors and processes that we aim to study. Just like an archival researcher, historical actors often experience confusion when faced with a challenge of making crucial decisions. There are too many things for them to consider, and they know too little about the possible implications of their actions. What we perceive as a historical outcome often emerges from such processes of confusion and mistakes, as a consolidation of nervous, haphazard decisions by historical actors.

Just like an ethnographer attempting to immerse themselves into a new social setting, a historical sociologist in an archive should adopt the attitude of a (purported) naive observer, pay attention to the social contexts of historical actors, and follow them along in their journey as they move through historical events. Rather than projecting an abstract explanation from a top-down perspective, a historical sociologist should first attempt to immerse herself in the situation of the historical actors, pursuing the position of “fly on the wall” eavesdropping on people in the archives.

Although sociology has been late to the conversation, the methodological and theoretical discussions on archives have been going on for decades (Foucault 1982; Ginzburg 1989; Koselleck 2002; Stoler 2010; Agamben 2009), and the exchange between history and ethnography (Stoler 2008; see also Biernacki 2012; Hunter 2013) has produced a novel understanding of the relationship between archival evidence and theory construction. Drawing inspirations from these precedents, we discuss how a historical sociologist can actually think like an ethnographer in an archive. In our manuscript, we also discuss how this approach led us to rethink our respective cases in our book projects—i.e. jail overcrowding in the L.A. county in the 1990s, the federal reserve and housing desegregation in the 1980s, and the immigration restriction in the 1920s—by forcing us to consider new evidence and theory. In this feature, however, we focus on explaining the analytical leverages and pragmatic guidelines emanating from ethnographic dispositions.

Ethnographic Dispositions

Naiveté

It can be all too easy to approach the archives with a sense of knowing what comes next, due to our temporal relation to those represented in the archival materials. Simply put, by virtue of living in the present, we already know who won the key historical struggles and who survived to tell the tale. Because our interest lies not just in discovering historical facts but in constructing theories out of historical events, we tend to start with a set of research questions based on an observed outcome. The traditional approaches have often relied on comparison of carefully selected cases, designed to isolate key variables of interest. Before going into an archive, we are told, we should be able to clearly articulate our research question and hypothesis, in order to effectively obtain the answer we want. This is one way of approaching the archive, but not the only way.

We call for those venturing into the archives to approach the materials with a disposition similar to ethnographers. When an ethnographer embarks on fieldwork, she often assumes the position of a naive, untrained observer. Indeed it is often the case that an ethnographer knows little about the setting, at least not as well as the people whom she is trying to study. This naiveté is not just being inexperienced and ignorant, but a particular epistemological stance an ethnographer takes to maximize analytical leverage in the given setting. An archival researcher should attempt to approach the archive with as few presuppositions as possible, and remain open about what the story could be, what the outcome might mean, or what actors intend when they talk. Just like an ethnographer seeing the quotidian in new ways, an archival researcher should assume the position of a novice observer, leveraging her naiveté to uncover the hidden structure under the mundane.

Through naiveté we can develop a better appreciation for contingency in historical processes. As Ermakoff (2015) argued, “positive contingency”—defined as a moment when individual agency gain maximum leverage in a causal process—remains underappreciated when we look at a historical process from a deterministic perspective. By maintaining a naive stance, however, we are freed from our preconceived notions and better equipped to capture the key moments and decisions.

Observing Actions in Context

Ethnographers are typically advised to prioritize their own eyes over their assumptions about people and setting—in other words, they are encouraged to forget about who the actors are and instead collect data on how they act in their respective social settings. We tend to assume that a certain type of people (e.g. colonial administrators) act in a certain way (e.g. denigrate indigenous culture), but often times this assumption is dependent on the situation (e.g. identifying more with indigenous rulers to boast their standing in homeland; see Steinmetz 2007). As Howard Becker (1998: 45) puts it, “people do whatever they have to or whatever seems good to them at the time, and that since situations change, there is no reason to expect that they act in consistent ways.”

This theoretical perspective has implications in archives as well. When historical sociologists read documents, the focus should not only be on “what” happened, but also on “how” something happened—events and actions should be understood in their context, in their relationship to things around them. When ethnographer urge people to tell “how” something happened, it is an invitation for stories with more informative detail, accounts that include not only reasoning for whatever was done, but also the actions of others that contributed to the outcome. When going into a field site, Becker (1998: 60) “wanted to know all the circumstances of an event, everything that was going on around it, everyone who was involved,” Because he “wanted to know the sequence of things, how one thing led to another, how this didn’t happen until that happened.”

With this stance, we can understand how historical actors learn from their mistakes and change through a particular historical process. Just as researchers learn from dead ends and false starts in archives, historical actors also learn through blunders, and their dispositions and actions evolve as they engage in historical processes. By focusing on “how,” we develop a more dynamic appreciation of how actors and situations come together to produce historical outcomes.

Incrementalism

Ethnographers typically stay within a field site for an extended period of time, following along as events unfold. In the process, they pay attention to the specific manner in which events unfold rather than starting with the outcome and working backwards. Because events of interest are by definition rare, ethnographers often try to spend as much time in the field site as possible, immersed in the mundane everyday routine of the setting, waiting for that spark of eventfulness. Being there and seeing it first hand, as they say, is an ideal of ethnographic immersion, although it is easier said than done. After all, things happen fast and one cannot be present in the field site every day, every hour.

The ideal of immersion has a better chance in archives. Luckily for an archival researcher, the time in the archives progresses rather slowly. Different, but limited accounts of historical events are frozen in the format of documents, waiting to be discovered. It is as if there is not just one but a multitude of flies on the wall, reporting to historical sociologists their own accounts of how things unfolded. By going through these multitude of accounts, a historical sociologist obtains not just a birds-eye view but a Rashomon-like perspective into the historical process.

In pursuing incrementalism, we can gain comparative leverage to exclude alternative explanations. It is tempting to divide archival evidences into two camps, ones that mattered in producing outcomes and ones that led to dead-ends. In reading incrementally and sequentially, a historical sociologist is better able to pay attention to these diverging paths: what propelled historical actors to go down a particular path that was not successful? What does that tell us about the path that was eventually successful? By doing this we can see which alternative routes were actually feasible to the actors in their particular contexts and rule out explanations that made no sense to actors embedded in those contexts.

Deep Dive into Archives

With ethnographic dispositions, the troubles we encounter in the archives as researchers become an asset rather than burden. That is, much like ethnographers, we try to walk the path along with historical actors, tracing the process through which they learned, as we are learning from archival documents ourselves. We do understand that time and funding are limited for our historical sociologists, and that a historical sociologist cannot stay forever immersed in the historical setting. In order to make a new contribution to knowledge, however, one cannot avoid the exercise of getting lost and finding her way back again. We hope the ethnographic dispositions presented here help future researchers finding their way in archives.

References

Agamben, Gorgio. 2009. The Signature of All Things: On Method. The MIT Press.

Becker, Howard. 1998. Tricks of the Trade: How to Think about Your Research While You’re Doing it. University Of Chicago Press.

Biernacki, Richard. 2012. Reinventing Evidence in Social Inquiry: Decoding Facts and Variables. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ermakoff, Ivan. 2015. “The Structure of Contingency” American Journal of Sociology 121(1): 64-125.

Foucault, Michel. 1982. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Vintage.

Ginzburg, Carlo. 1989. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hunter, Marcus. 2013. Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America. Oxford University Press.

Koselleck, Reinhart. 2002. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford University Press.

Steinmetz, George. 2007. The Devil’s Handwriting: Precoloniality and the German Colonial State in Qingdao, Samoa, and Southwest Africa. University of Chicago Press.

Stoler, Ann. 2010. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton University Press.

Willis, Paul.1981. Learning to Labor: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Columbia University Press.

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019.  Photo is from http://www.cdcr.ca.gov/News/images/overcrowding/CSP-Los-Angeles.jpg

Laura García-Montoya and James Mahoney

Historical and case study analysts have long focused attention on critical events—sometimes referred to as watersheds, turning points, or critical junctures—when explaining outcomes of interest. These analysts suggest that, during relatively well-defined periods, cases experience occurrences that are highly consequential for their subsequent development. Examples of critical events from comparative- historical work include the choice of coalitional partner by liberal political parties in interwar Europe (Luebbert 1991); episodes of labor incorporation into the state in Latin America (Collier and Collier 1991); the fate of tribal groups during independence struggles in North Africa (Charrad 2001); the formation of inter-ethnic associations in Indian cities (Varshney 2002); and the choices by white moderates about racial exclusion in the United States, Brazil, and South Africa (Marx 1998).

In this paper, we seek to contribute to this literature by offering a framework for the identification and analysis of critical events in case study research. The paper is motivated in part by the lack of a theory of causality in the literature on critical junctures and path dependence. As a result, when researchers assert that event X was a critical juncture for outcome Y, it is hard to know exactly what they mean by the assertion. This framework offers a general theory of causality for the analysis of individual cases.

We define a critical event as a contingent event that is causally important for an outcome of interest in a particular case. The definition features three components: event, contingency, and causal importance. An event is a temporally bounded state of affairs. To serve as causes in explanations, events must be well-defined. We define a contingent event as an event that was not expected to occur, given well-specified expectations. Causal events are also a subset of all events, X as a causal event for Y if: (1) X and Y are events that occur in the actual world; (2) X occurs before Y in time; and (3) there is a logical relationship between X and Y that can be specified using necessary and/or sufficient conditions. Causally important events are a subset of causal events. We define and measure the causal importance of an event for an outcome using two dimensions: logical importance (i.e., the extent to which the event is necessary or sufficient for an outcome) and logical relevance (i.e., the extent to which the event is necessary and sufficient for an outcome). A causally important event has a high level of logical importance and a non-trivial level of logical relevance.

In this framework, critical events are at the intersection of contingent events and causally important events. We show why both causal importance and contingency are essential ingredients of critical events by considering non-critical events in which only one of these features is present. We emphasize that critical event analysis is not always an appropriate mode of explanation. Non-critical events often or usually best explain outcomes of interest. In seeking to clarify critical event analysis, therefore, we do not wish to suggest that most explanations in the social sciences should take this form. We view the question of whether critical event analysis is an appropriate framework as an empirical matter: it depends on whether a critical event best explains the outcome of interest.

Token Causality

Our framework is part of a larger and ongoing scholarly effort to develop a theory of token (or actual) causality. With token causality, one explores whether a specific state of affairs is a cause of a specific outcome in a particular case. Although case study and historical researchers have made much methodological progress in recent years, they still lack a fully adequate framework for the study of token causes.

Our approach to critical event analysis is broadly consistent with regularity theories of causation. Regularity theories hold that causation between X and Y is marked by spatiotemporal contiguity, temporal succession, and constant conjunction (Mackie 1974; Wright 1985; Psillos 2002; see also Hume 1975; Mill 1911). We introduce two refinements to extend a regularity theory to the analysis of individual cases. First, the cases under analysis are almost entirely possible cases rather than actual cases. The use of possible world semantics and counterfactual analysis allow us to gain the leverage needed to examine regularities when only one actual world case is under analysis. Second, our framework derives inferential power by analyzing the chain of events that links an initial event X to a final outcome Y. In analyzing this causal chain, however, we retain a regularity approach: each of the links in the chain is a separate relationship among events that is analyzed as a causal regularity.

The distribution of possible world cases across an event (X) and its logical complement or negation (X) allows the researcher to make a statement about the probability of the event even though the researcher analyzes only one actual world case. If the researcher asserts that X is or was more likely than X, she does so because a higher proportion of possible world cases are or were located in set X than in set X. If she asserts that the probability of event X is 80%, she does so because 80% of all possible world cases are located in the set for event X (the remaining 20% are in X). We use this approach in defining events, contingency, and causally importance—i.e., the constituents of a critical event.

Defining Critical Events

Events

Events are well-bounded episodes marked by the unfolding of coherent modes of activity. They serve as temporal and substantive anchors for organizing the analysis of a case study. A well-defined event is temporally bounded; that is, it has a crisp beginning and end. The temporal boundedness of events facilitates their use in causal analysis. In addition, a well-defined event calls attention to its specific components—what we call its sufficiency properties and its necessity properties.

First, events play a productive and generative role in actively bringing about an outcome (cf. Lewis 2000; McDermott 2002). We call this aspect of an event its sufficiency properties. Events produce outcomes by generating a distinctive process that culminates in the outcome of interest. Second, events play a permissive and enabling role in allowing for the occurrence of an outcome. We call this aspect of an event its necessity properties. Events enable and permit outcomes by influencing the context or circumstances in which the outcome occurs. To identify necessity properties, therefore, the analyst can consider those aspects of the event whose counterfactual negation would (or would likely) cause the negation of the outcome of interest.

In sum, when formulating hypotheses about the sufficiency properties of an event, the challenge is identifying the productive causal chain that links the event to the outcome. When formulating hypotheses about the necessity properties of an event, the challenge is identifying the aspects of content and circumstance that the event shifts to allow for the outcome of interest.

Contingency

The concept of contingency has been used in the social sciences in different ways. However, we argue that despite differences, formulations have in common the following idea: an event is contingent when it is not expected. The source of these expectations may vary, ranging from likelihood functions to theoretical traditions, to known causal factors, to common sense intuitions. In each case, however, the contingent event is not well anticipated by the relevant model, theory, function, or belief system. In this sense, events are contingent vis-`a-vis our expectations; our expectations make events contingent. It is worth noticing that this understanding of contingency is consistent with the philosophical definition: a contingent event is neither necessary nor impossible. Contingency calls attention to the non-necessity of the occurrence of the event; a contingent event happens in some possible worlds but not in others. In turn, we propose an empirical measure of contingency that examines the distribution of possible world cases across the event and its negation. For a token event X, contingency is measured as the percentage of possible world cases in the set ∼X.

Causal importance

The idea that causal importance should be built into the definition of a critical event is not particularly controversial. However, case study researchers currently lack a widely shared framework for conceptualizing and measuring causal importance. We propose heuristics involving counterfactual analysis to help estimate this distribution. The heuristics require the analyst to consider possible world cases that are and are not consistent with necessity and sufficiency. Of special importance is the closest possible inconsistent case, which is the case closest to the actual world in which X = 0 and Y = 1 for the evaluation of necessity properties or X = 1 and Y = 0 for the evaluation of sufficiency properties.

With necessity properties, the analyst constructs possible worlds by considering different versions of X while holding all else constant in context and circumstance. Some versions of X require more extensive rewrites than others and thus are more distant from the actual world. Under this approach, X is more necessary for Y to the degree that the closest possible inconsistent case requires a large miracle for the occurrence of X. With sufficiency properties, by contrast, the analyst constructs possible worlds by holding X constant (identical to the actual world) and introducing via miracle changes to contingent aspects of context and circumstance. Some of these changes are more significant than others, requiring larger rewrites for their instantiation. In the approach, X is more sufficient for Y to the degree that the closest possible inconsistent case requires large changes to contingent aspects of context and circumstance.

The relative importance of any given token cause is a function of its necessity properties and its sufficiency properties. Any token cause will become more important as it comes closer to being both necessary and sufficient for the outcome of interest. For our purposes, a core issue concerns the threshold of necessity and sufficiency required for causal importance and thus a critical event. In addressing this issue, we give identical weight to necessity and sufficiency, privileging neither. We require that a critical event meet minimal thresholds on the dimensions of logical importance and logical relevance. To measure logical importance, we consider the extent to which a condition is necessary or sufficient for an outcome. To qualify as a critical event, we propose that a condition must be substantially higher than 50% on either the necessity dimension or the sufficiency dimension. For logical relevance, we measure the extent to which a condition is necessary and sufficient for an outcome. To qualify as a critical event, we propose that a condition must be substantially higher than 0% for both the necessity and the sufficiency dimensions. The first threshold of logical importance has the effect of ensuring that all critical events are conditions that approximate necessary, sufficient, or necessary and sufficient conditions. The second threshold of logical relevance has the effect of ensuring that no trivial conditions are included as critical events.

Discussion

Defined by both causal importance and contingency, a critical event allows for a parsimonious explanation of a puzzling outcome. The appeal of this mode of explanation is partly linked to its causal austerity. But its attraction is also related to the idea that an event that was not predetermined decisively shapes the future of a case. With critical event analysis, the counterfactual question of what would have happened – what could have happened – is spotlighted and given center stage. Critical event explanation accords with self-understandings of one’s own personal development: we often explain our own trajectory using critical event analysis. Given these appealing features, historical and case study researchers will surely continue to search for critical events in their explanations of puzzling outcomes.

Yet our goal has not been to suggest that all or even most case study explanations should or will be able to identify critical events. In fact, in other modes of explanation, non-critical events are key to understand puzzling outcomes. The category of non-critical event can be partitioned into three kinds of events: events that are contingent but not causally important; events that are causally important but not contingent; and events that are neither contingent nor causally important.

First, some events are contingent but not causally important. This is the case if their occurrence of is theoretically surprising but does not play a major role in enabling or generating an outcome. These events may appear as pieces of noise that shape an outcome in small, unpredictable, and inconsistent ways. In general, they are assumed to be too random and inconsequential to merit sustained attention. Another important set of events, are those that are important causes that are not contingent. These events differ from critical events in that their occurrence is anticipated by and encapsulated within theoretical orientations. When explaining contingent outcomes, these non-contingent, important causes are not featured in the explanation because they are logically impossible: an individually important cause of a contingent outcome must itself be contingent.

Finally, some events are neither causally important nor contingent. These events may help set the general context against which important causal processes unfold. They may also contain within them important events; or they may be overarching events within which important sub- events are located. Usually, however, events that are neither causally important nor contingent refer to trivial and expected occurrences that are ignored or taken for granted in case study explanation. A major exception exists in which unimportant, non-contingent events do play the leading explanatory role: gradualist explanations of contingent outcomes. With a gradualist explanation, many small, unexceptional causes push in a consistent direction to enable and produce a puzzling outcome (cf. Thelen 1999; 2003; 2004; Streeck and Thelen 2005; Mahoney and Thelen 2010).

In one sense, critical event analysis and gradualist analysis are rival frameworks that compete with one another. For any puzzlingly outcome in a particular case, one can pose the question of whether critical event analysis or gradualist analysis better explains the outcome. Likewise, if a scholar asserts that a critical event explains in substantial measure an outcome, one can always explore the rival hypothesis that a gradual process actually explains the outcome (or vice versa). In another sense, however, the two modes complement one another rather than compete. On this view, some contingent outcomes are best explained by critical events, whereas others are best explained by gradualist processes of change. The two frameworks may both be useful for case study research, though not simultaneously useful for a specific outcome in a particular case. This complementarity view suggests an important research agenda focused on identifying when and why a given framework is more useful for explaining a given outcome. It is an open empirical question regarding the frequency of punctuated versus gradual change in the social and political world. And it is an open question regarding the kinds of puzzlingly outcomes that are best explained by gradual processes of change versus critical events.

Going forward, the framework of token causation developed in this paper could offer a common vocabulary and a common orientation for synthesizing work on critical events and work on gradual change. The point of such a synthesis would not be to dissolve critical event analysis and gradualist explanation into a compromise framework in which all change follows an intermediate pace. Rather, the goal must be to arrive at a satisfactory solution for understanding when and why one kind of change prevails rather than the other. By beginning to clarify the critical event side of this possible synthesis, we hope that this paper encourages new methodological work by scholars interested in the other gradualist side.

References

Charrad, M. 2001. States and Women’s Rights: the Making of Postcolonial Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Collier, Ruth Berins, and David Collier. 1991. Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin America. Princeton University Press.

Hume, David. 1975. Enquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the principles of morals. 3rd ed. OCLC: ocm01466028. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lewis, David. 2000. “Causation as Influence”. The Journal of Philosophy 97, no. 4: 182.

Luebbert, Gregory M. 1991. Liberalism, Fascism, or Social Democracy: Social Classes and the Political Origins of Regimes in Interwar Europe. New York: OUP USA.

Mackie, John L. 1965. “Causes and Conditions”. American Philosophical Quarterly 2 (4): 245–264.

Mahoney, James, and Kathleen Ann Thelen, eds. 2010. Explaining institutional change: ambiguity, agency, and power. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Marx, Anthony W. 1998. Making race and nation: a comparison of South Africa, the United States, and Brazil. 1st pbk. ed. Cambridge studies in comparative politics. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

McDermott, Michael, and Journal of Philosophy, Inc. 2002. “Causation: Influence Versus Sufficiency”. Journal of Philosophy 99 (2): 84–101. Visited on 08/03/2018.
Mill, John Stuart. 1911. A System of Logic: Ratiocinative and Inductive. London: Longmans, Green, / Company.

Moore, Barrington. 1993. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Beacon Press.

Psillos, Stathis. 2002. Causation and explanation. Central problems of philosophy. OCLC: 249620406.

Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Univ. Press.
Quadagno, Jill, and Stan J. Knapp. 1992. “Have Historical Sociologists Forsaken Theory?: Thoughts on the History/Theory Relationship”. Sociological Methods & Research 20, no. 4: 481–507.

Thelen, Kathleen. 1999. “Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics”. Annual Review of Political Science 2, no. 1 (): 369–404.

—2003. “How Institutions Evolve: Insights from Comparative Historical Analysis.” In Comparative Historical Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. by James Mahoney and Dietrich Rueschmeyer, 305–336. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

—2004. How Institutions Evolve: the Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge studies in comparative politics. Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Varshney, Ashutosh. 2003. Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India. 2nd Revised edition. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Wright, Richard W. 1985. “Causation in Tort Law”.

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019. The cover image is from https://mikedeakinart.com/art-journal-page/art-journal-page-cause-effect/

Emily Erikson

We have four outstanding papers here, two tackling archival issues and two tackling causal issues. Anna Skarpelis and Armando Lara-Millan, Brian Sargent, and Sunmin Kim are all advocating for a more thoughtful approach to archival research. Interestingly, Skarpelis suggests stepping outside of the archive to map its structure whereas Lara Millan, Sargent, and Kim suggest immersing and indeed losing oneself in the archives in a sort of directionless way to pull out some of its hidden structures. Similarly, Laura García-Montoya & Jim Mahoney are in tension with Isaac Reed & Paul Lichterman, where one team calls for focus on events and the other on dissolving events into linked chains of meaning and conduct. Both, however, converge in situating their conversation around counterfactual causal reasoning and in focusing on the drivers of action rather than the outcomes, which I think is interesting as well as potentially problematic.

Let me begin with the archivists. Skarpelis has a very interesting and eminently readable paper. She refers to the subfield of “computational historical sociology”, which I’m going to say is possibly overstating things but I am happy to see this term in circulation and hope it gains traction. She makes many excellent points, but there are three areas where I would raise questions.

There is a potential conflation here between the archives and the state, which makes for a particularly dark view of archives. Anna’s cases are two fascist states, so I can see how she arrived here. But many archives are not state products. Company archives, merchant archives, market records, letters, museum collections, the list goes on and on. In many of these the structural is incidental to what the people were trying to accomplish, accidental and much less insidious than the power of records of activity in a fascist state. But also very important. Second, Skarpelis writes of the inevitability of the archival process turning a person into record. Again, I will say this is not the case in many non-state archives, which record transactions. Indeed, there is an argument to be made that most archives record interactions and transactions, not people. But again, this may be about different types of archives. And third, there is Borgesian tension in the argument, which calls for a careful reconstruction of the history of archives in order to fully understand their documents. Essentially you need an archive for the archive. To me this suggests not that this is an impossible task, but that the best way to conduct historical research is to combine archives. I wonder if Skarpelis would agree that this is consistent with her argument and an effective approach.

A different tack is suggested in Lara-Millan, Sargent, and Kim’s thoughtful paper about the ethnographic imagination in archival research. I like the idea of losing oneself in the archives, and agree alongside luminaries like Charles Peirce and Guy Debord, that this is an intuition building strategy. But there is a danger here. Is a detailed description of events always good? Do we always want to see from the eyes of one person. What we might lose is the systematic and comparative perspective. We are scholars, and I think the end goal is not only to understand why people made the choices they did. It is also to understand how certain outcomes were produced. We want to know more than the people. We want to see for example how opportunities constrain action, how interdependencies in decision-making produce unexpected outcomes, and how long-term structural processes can explode into visibility in sudden events.

Garcia-Montoya & Mahoney share with Lara-Millan, Sargent, and Kim. a focus on contingency, so let me then ask both what if these contingent events are just moments of visibility for temporally unfolding structural conditions, in the way that revolution can be tied to demographic change? I also worry that the emphasis on truly contingent events may give you the least predictive power of all approaches. If an event is truly unusual, it is not likely to occur again, so then our theories aren’t very powerful.

But accepting that there is a benefit to identifying these significant events. I think there still maybe issues that are difficult to work out. What parts of an event are important? How you do case an event? Does it matter that there is an election or is it more important that the election was between Bush and Gore? If it is about estimating the causal effect of Bush and Gore running against each other with Ralph Nader as a 3rd party contender, then what is the value of that for understanding future elections. I am also very unsure as to how I can estimate the probability of events that don’t happen. And finally, I wonder about the choice of elections as an example. Elections are a highly structured moment of contingency. They are designed that way. How useful is this approach for less structured and contingent moments?

Isaac Reed and Paul Lichterman are also concerned with causal analysis and make a compelling case for investigating “actively constructed cases to compare different chains of meaningful action that theoretical categories make comparable.” The idea here is to focus on similar patterns of conduct and their outcomes rather than picking chains of action that are tied to some particular outcome. My first question, is how different is this from that refrain we all got drilled into us in graduate school: don’t select on the independent variable. Does study of collective action accomplish this approach to situated chains of meaning and conduct? It seems to satisfy some of the conditions.

The paper raises very serious and under-thought issues: Can settings be variables? Can structures be agents? Are forms different from contents? And importantly, are we doing damage to our explanations by swapping out these fundamentally different types of objects and inserting them into the same causal models. It is terrific to progress being made on these issues. But I wonder if meta communication is going to provide an answer. In the end metacommunication in the sciences failed Du Bois, but sustained Dewey and James. How can we make it better?

In conclusion, while I think this each of these papers makes important contributions, the common thread running throughout may be an animosity to outcomes and an emphasis on contingency. I find this concerning. Now more than ever, don’t we want research that helps us solve particular problems?

 

* This essay is from Trajectories (Newsletter of the ASA) Vol 30 (No2-3), Winter/Spring 2019.