Sociology, n-1

Charles Tilly passed away this morning. He was mentor to some of my professors, and I was assigned one of his books, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics), for the seminar I am currently finishing. Here's a selection of my favorite excerpts from the book. They're probably not the most relevant to his theory or topic, but these were most salient to me when I read the book:

Category formation is itself a crucial political process. Category formation creates identities. A social category consists of a set of sites that share a boundary distinguishing all of them from (and relating all of them to) at least one set of sites visibly excluded by the boundary. Category formation occurs by means of three different mechanisms: invention, borrowing, and encounter. Invention involves authoritative drawing of a boundary and prescription of relations across that boundary...Borrowing involves importation of a boundary cum relations package already existing elsewhere and its installation in the local setting...Encounter involves initial contact between previously separate (but internally well-connected) networks in the course of which members of one network begin competing for resources with members of the other, interactively generating definitions of the boundary and relations across it. (p.29-30)

He followed this for a few pages to argue that political actors (specifically, people engaged in contentious politics) are often linked into networks of other political actors as "bundles of social relations...Such actors, however, almost never describe themselves as composite networks. Instead they offer collective nouns: they call themselves workers, women, residents of X, or United Front Against Y. Such political identities offer public, collective answers to the questions 'Who are you?', 'Who are we?', and 'Who are they?' "(p.32).

Political identities assemble the following crucial elements (p.32)
1. boundaries separating "us" from "them"
2. shared stories about those boundaries
3. social relations across boundaries
4. social relations within the boundaries

And finally:

A significant share of collective violence involves activation and reinforcement of boundaries. Claims to be or represent a certain "we" always identify a boundary separating us from "them," whoever they are. Any individual or population, however, always has multiple identities - and thus multiple boundaries - available...Boundary activation singles out one of these shared identities and its opposition to other identities...activation of us-them boundaries often promotes damaging interaction where social relations previously went on in a generally peaceful fashion...furthermore, violence sometimes occurs in the course of power struggles within categories and for control over public representation of those categories. The stronger the emphasis on a single us-them boundary, in general, the greater the salience of damage in all interactions and the more extensive the coordination among all violent actors.

And look: his Wikipedia page has already been updated to note his death. Efficient is this new technology.