Untitled - socium.ge

Afterword: an historian’s view on thenetwork societyRosalind WilliamsTHE TRADING ZONE OF SOCIAL SCIENCE ANDHISTORYAfter this tour du monde, this mappa mundi, this astounding overview oftoday’s world – its economics, politics, communications, cultures, institutions,social movements – how can there possibly be anything more to say? Whatcan an historian add to this rich, fertile, expansive survey?Historians think in time. As the title of this volume suggests, the contributorsare primarily thinking across space: a cross-cultural perspective of theworld as it now exists, not presuming to cover the entire globe, but ranging farand wide enough to give a sense of the whole. When I was asked to join thisparty, at first I assumed my presence would add a vertical dimension, addingthe depth of time to the view of the network society, saying a few words aboutwhere it comes from and proposing how it resembles or does not resembleearlier societies. It did not take me long, however, to realize that I would notadd much to the party if I begin with concepts and issues as they are laid outhere (beginning with the concepts of “network” and “society”) and simplyproject them backwards. Instead, I need to suggest how historians constructthings differently in the first place.Social scientists and historians engage with the same reality – our commonworld – but in different ways. The differences arise in part from professionaltraining and institutions, but they go much deeper. One of the fascinatingcomplexities of the human mind is the persistent coexistence of two verydifferent modes of structuring human experience: through logic and throughnarrative. Whether or not this coexistence will endure as long as humanitydoes, it apparently goes back to the dawn of what we like to call civilization.Most of the earliest examples of writing encode logical analysis, usually in theform of what we would now call “business records”: lists of goods, reckonings,tallies, counting (Robinson, 1995). The earliest examples of poetryencode stories about where people come from, what their identity is, whattheir collective experience means.432