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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Little Timothy is playing with his older brother Geoffrey, when he comes running to his mother.
"Mommy, Mommy," he starts in. "I was playing with my truck, and then Geoffrey came and he said it was his turn to play with the truck even though it's my truck and then he pushed me."
"Timothy!" his mother says, silencing him. "Don't be a tattletale."
Timothy has heard that phrase--"Don't be a tattletale"--countless times, and it always stops him short. He has offered his mother an eyewitness account of a crime. His mother, furthermore, in no way disputes the truth of his story. Yet what does she do? She rejects it in favor of a simplistic social formula: Don't be a tattletale. It makes no sense. Timothy's mother would never use such a formula to trump a story if she were talking to his father. On the contrary, his mother and father tattle to each other about Geoffrey all the time. And, if Timothy were to tattle on Geoffrey to his best friend, Bruce, Bruce wouldn't reject the story in favor of a formula, either. Narratives are the basis of Timothy's friendship with Bruce. They explain not just effects but causes. They matter--except in this instance, of a story told by Timothy to Mommy about Geoffrey, in which Mommy is suddenly indifferent to stories altogether. What is this don't-be-a-tattletale business about?
In "Why?" (Princeton; $24.95), the Columbia University scholar Charles Tilly sets out to make sense of our reasons for giving reasons. In the tradition of the legendary sociologist Erving Goffman, Tilly seeks to decode the structure of everyday social interaction, and the result is a book that forces readers to reexamine everything from the way they talk to their children to the way they argue about politics.
In Tilly's view, we rely on four general categories of reasons. The first is what he calls conventions--conventionally accepted explanations. Tilly would call "Don't be a tattletale" a convention. The second is stories, and what distinguishes a story ("I was playing with my truck, and then Geoffrey came in . . .") is a very specific account of cause and effect. Tilly cites the sociologist Francesca Polletta's interviews with people who were active in the civil-rights sit-ins of the nineteen-sixties. Polletta repeatedly heard stories that stressed the spontaneity of the protests, leaving out the role of civil-rights organizations, teachers, and churches. That's what stories do. As Tilly writes, they circumscribe time and space, limit the number of actors...
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