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Narrative Social Structure

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface................................................................................................xiii1. Introduction........................................................................................12. Social and Literary Structure of Isnad: Whose Narrative?............................................293. The Ceaseless Synergy between Literary and Social Structures........................................684. Reconstructing the Hadith Transmission Network: Narratives into Networks............................945. From Synchronic to Diachronic Methods: Temporal Constraints on Action...............................1246. Social and Literary Dynamics of Authority Formation: The Macro-Level LRS Effect.....................1597. Narrative and Sociology of Intellectuals: From Ibn Khaldun to Collins...............................1808. On the Shoulders of Giants: Chain of Memory and the Micro-Level LRS Effect..........................2129. Conclusion: Speech and Action Conjoined on the Diachronic Axis......................................245Notes..................................................................................................261Bibliography...........................................................................................281Index..................................................................................................297

Chapter One

A central problem in the social sciences and humanities today is that of accounting for the relationship between social and literary structures, on the one hand, and the interaction between synchronic and diachronic structures, on the other. In place of a single overarching "Structuralism," one instead sees structuralisms both in the social sciences and in the humanities, with striking gaps and unclaimed territories between them. In most structural research, observations are not made on the system as a whole but on some part of it. This has created a gap between social and literary structuralisms; a similar gap is also observable between synchronic and diachronic structuralisms. I suggest here instead that a social organization is also a discourse network comprising synchronic and diachronic relations. As an alternative to the current disjointed view of discourse and society, this book suggests a more integrative paradigm, which asserts that the social world is an outcome of the ceaseless synergy between words and actions on the diachronic and synchronic axes; therefore, we cannot give primacy in our research to the one at the expense of the other.

"A man's mirror is his actions, not his words," reads one line of a couplet by Ziya Pasha, a nineteenth-century Ottoman poet. This line simply reflects the worldwide popular view, distinguishing between actions and words while privileging the former over the latter. The justification for such a view comes in the second line of the couplet, "For the level of one's intelligence is reflected in his work" (Ggn, 2001: 159-61). Sociological theory with its varying strands has also, since its inception, internalized this prevalent sentiment. It has grounded itself on a distinction between social action and discourse, giving priority to the former over the latter, if not exclusively focusing on the former. As a result, sociologists have left words to scholars in linguistics and the humanities.

Yet recently this conventional division of labor in the academy has come under attack and begun to erode. Narrative Social Structure also contributes to this process by arguing that words and deeds are ineluctably interrelated and that they jointly construct social structures. More specifically, the book, deriving from Ferdinand de Saussure's legacy, aims to bridge the gap between discursive and social structures, on the one hand, and the gap between synchronic and diachronic structures, on the other. Bridging these two gaps constitutes the two tasks that this book undertakes. Since I argue, along with Saussure, that conjoining words and deeds or discursive and social patterns must be on the diachronic axis, the two goals of this book are intrinsically related to each other.

As to the first goal of the book, Jurgen Habermas and Harrison White, among others, have already taken the initial steps. Although the founding fathers of sociology, such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, completely neglected the discursive dimension of social action, successive generations of sociologists increasingly realized the inseparability of discursive and social processes. The second generation of sociologists, led by Talcott Parsons, could no longer ignore discourse and incorporated it into their analyses, yet only as an epiphenomenon. Today the new generation of sociologists, including Andrew Abbott, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Wuthnow, and William Labov, increasingly recognizes the inseparability of both structures.

As to the second goal of the book, much needs to be done because diachronic structures have long been ignored, and the promise of structuralism in this regard has yet to be fulfilled, although almost a century has passed since its first formalization in the work of Saussure. Saussure proposed two types of structures on the time axis: synchronic and diachronic. He also proposed two other types of structures on the analytical-level axis: micro and macro. The matrix produced by these four dimensions summarizes Saussure's strategy with respect to structural query. Structuralists from the humanities and the social sciences have neglected the diachronic structures, for the most part, and concentrated on the analytical-level axis. Presently, however, any attempt to couple discursive and social patterns needs to take into consideration the temporal constraints involved in discursive and social action. The synchronic approach to the analysis of social and discursive actions is based on a hypothetical and inauthentic concept of social process because social and discursive actions alike are embedded within temporal structures that can be ignored only at a cost.

With the goal of bridging this gap and coupling the structures of speech and action, I extend the query about structures in the discursive and social processes to the persistent patterns in their ceaseless interaction. I argue that without an uninterrupted synergy between discursive and social structures, daily social life would be impossible to imagine. With a focus on the patterns in the interface, I offer a new explanation, on both the macro and the micro levels, for the construction of authority in a discourse network through time. More specifically, the question this work revolves around is why some social actors gain more aggregate or individual authority than others in a discourse network.

I extend, in the course of doing that, the application of current methods of synchronic (cross-sectional) social network analysis to diachronic (cross-temporal) social networks. Presently, social network analysis concentrates primarily on synchronic structures and uses cross-sectional data. In turn, I relate my findings on diachronic social networks to the research on cross-sectional social networks or social organizations in general. In doing this, I have as my purpose to demonstrate how the study of cross-sectional networks and the study of...