Contentious Conversation - )

Social Research, Fall, 1998 by Charles Tilly

Instead of choosing between starkly opposed instrumentalist and primordialist accounts, however, students of South Asia's Hindu-Muslim conflicts, of ethnic mobilization, of nationalism, indeed of contentious politics in general can adopt a third alternative: they can recognize the conversational character of contention. They can examine such a conversation's location in continuously negotiated interchanges among specific interlocutors, its constraint and mediation by historically accumulated understandings concerning identities and relations of the parties, its incessant modification of those identities and relations, hence its crucial causal contribution to interactions that instrumentalists explain on the basis of individual or collective interests and primordialists explain on the basis of deeply grounded individual or collective sentiments.

Sudhir Sakar shares with many canny observers a tendency favored by conversational convention: a propensity to shift from shrewd interactional observation into individualistic theories about what he has observed. That propensity extends to observations of his own observation processes. Sahba, his collaborator in many any interviews, was a Muslim woman. "The Muslim pehlwans [strong men]," Sakar notes,

   had been open with Sahba but understandably guarded when I was also
   present. With Sahba they could express their bitterness and contempt for
   Hindus, show their pride in their role in the protection of the community
   from the Hindu enemy. In my presence, they became less Muslim and more
   inclined to express universal humanist sentiments. For instance, there was
   pious talk, not exactly reassuring, that if I were cut my blood would be
   exactly the same color as theirs. By the end of the interviews, though, all
   the pehlwans were perceptibly warmer. I like to believe that this opening
   up was because they sensed my genuine interest in them as persons rather
   than being due to any typical "shrink" "hm-ms," phrases, or inflections. I
   suspect, though, that their different--although, for my purposes, highly
   complementary--psychic agendas when talking to Sahba and to me were
   dictated by shifts in their own sense of identity. In other words, with
   Sahba, a Muslim, their self-representation was more in terms of a shared
   social identity. With me, a Hindu, once they felt reassured that the
   situation did not contain any threat, personal identity became more
   salient, influencing their self-representations accordingly (Kakar, 1996,
   pp. 76-77).

Sakar is describing a process in which people's deployment of identities shifts as a function of their conversation partners and modifies as a consequence of conversation itself. Similarly, Sakar's vivid descriptions of interviews and events alike teem with interactions among participants in the course of which interpersonal negotiation transforms expressed identities and behavior attached to them. His subtle observations belie the psychic gloss he gives them.