Contentious Conversation - )

Social Research, Fall, 1998 by Charles Tilly

My point is not to carp at a brilliant analyst's logical inconsistencies but to underscore the conversational character of political contention. If we regard conversation as continuously negotiated communication and contention as mutual claim-making that bears significantly on the parties' interests--which is how I propose we understand the two terms for present purposes--then the two social phenomena overlap extensively. They overlap in the zone we might call contentious conversation. Conversation is contentious to the extent that it embodies mutual and contradictory claims, claims that, if realized, would significantly alter the longer-term behavior of at least one participant. Contentious conversation certainly activates visceral emotions, neurally processed cognitions, and individual anatomical performances. It also operates within limits set by historically formed conventions, with regard to collectively constituted interests, and in response to stimuli from leaders or bystanders. But it proceeds within a substantial, causally coherent realm that we cannot explain away by referring either to individual psyches or to group interests. Contentious conversation follows its own causal logic.

Beth Roy's subtle study of ostensibly communal conflict of 1954 in a Pakistani village (Bangladeshi by the time she arrived there in the 1980s) identifies the significance of that causal logic. She shows how a local scuffle among farmers working adjacent fields escalated into a full-scale alignment of self-identified Hindus against self-identified Muslims. At the start, Golam Fakir (categorically Muslim) and Kumar Tarkhania (categorically Hindu) interacted as disputants over the fact that Fakir's untethered cow had eaten Tarkhania's lentils. The series of confrontations did not begin as communal mobilization, but it approximated increasingly to classic models of Hindu/Muslim strife as it grew in geographic scope and mounted the national administrative hierarchy.

In addition to its empathetic description and astute detective work, Roy's study fascinates by its patient unpacking of complexities in actors, actions, and identities. Some Trouble With Cows (the title echoes one of the first stories about the 1954 conflicts Roy collected) centers on questions of identity:

   When I consider stories of village communalism, I want to know how people
   saw their world, how they placed their own desires within it, and how their
   sense of political possibility was influenced by distant winds of change.
   It has become common to assert that the most intimate domestic behaviors
   are in tact socially constructed. Collective experience is translated into
   psychological reality through a web of ideas internalized as invisible
   assumptions about the world. To unravel the psychological realities of
   collective behavior, I believe we must look to shared areas of
   understanding and social location. For instance, group actions are
   formulated from the experience of identity, that is, the complex
   construction of an individual's location in the community and her ties with
   others. Similarly, the will to action is born of detailed ideologies that
   often are experienced as common sense or unexamined assumptions about
   rights and powers (Roy, 1994, p. 3).