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Recep Senturk is Associate Professor of Sociology and Research Fellow at the Center for Islamic Studies (ISAM) in Istanbul, Turkey.

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Narrative Social Structure

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface................................................................................................xiii1. Introduction........................................................................................12. Social and Literary Structure of Isnad: Whose Narrative?............................................293. The Ceaseless Synergy between Literary and Social Structures........................................684. Reconstructing the Hadith Transmission Network: Narratives into Networks............................945. From Synchronic to Diachronic Methods: Temporal Constraints on Action...............................1246. Social and Literary Dynamics of Authority Formation: The Macro-Level LRS Effect.....................1597. Narrative and Sociology of Intellectuals: From Ibn Khaldun to Collins...............................1808. On the Shoulders of Giants: Chain of Memory and the Micro-Level LRS Effect..........................2129. Conclusion: Speech and Action Conjoined on the Diachronic Axis......................................245Notes..................................................................................................261Bibliography...........................................................................................281Index..................................................................................................297

Chapter One

A central problem in the social sciences and humanities today is that of accounting for the relationship between social and literary structures, on the one hand, and the interaction between synchronic and diachronic structures, on the other. In place of a single overarching "Structuralism," one instead sees structuralisms both in the social sciences and in the humanities, with striking gaps and unclaimed territories between them. In most structural research, observations are not made on the system as a whole but on some part of it. This has created a gap between social and literary structuralisms; a similar gap is also observable between synchronic and diachronic structuralisms. I suggest here instead that a social organization is also a discourse network comprising synchronic and diachronic relations. As an alternative to the current disjointed view of discourse and society, this book suggests a more integrative paradigm, which asserts that the social world is an outcome of the ceaseless synergy between words and actions on the diachronic and synchronic axes; therefore, we cannot give primacy in our research to the one at the expense of the other.

"A man's mirror is his actions, not his words," reads one line of a couplet by Ziya Pasha, a nineteenth-century Ottoman poet. This line simply reflects the worldwide popular view, distinguishing between actions and words while privileging the former over the latter. The justification for such a view comes in the second line of the couplet, "For the level of one's intelligence is reflected in his work" (Ggn, 2001: 159-61). Sociological theory with its varying strands has also, since its inception, internalized this prevalent sentiment. It has grounded itself on a distinction between social action and discourse, giving priority to the former over the latter, if not exclusively focusing on the former. As a result, sociologists have left words to scholars in linguistics and the humanities.

Yet recently this conventional division of labor in the academy has come under attack and begun to erode. Narrative Social Structure also contributes to this process by arguing that words and deeds are ineluctably interrelated and that they jointly construct social structures. More specifically, the book, deriving from Ferdinand de Saussure's legacy, aims to bridge the gap between discursive and social structures, on the one hand, and the gap between synchronic and diachronic structures, on the other. Bridging these two gaps constitutes the two tasks that this book undertakes. Since I argue, along with Saussure, that conjoining words and deeds or discursive and social patterns must be on the diachronic axis, the two goals of this book are intrinsically related to each other.

As to the first goal of the book, Jurgen Habermas and Harrison White, among others, have already taken the initial steps. Although the founding fathers of sociology, such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber, completely neglected the discursive dimension of social action, successive generations of sociologists increasingly realized the inseparability of discursive and social processes. The second generation of sociologists, led by Talcott Parsons, could no longer ignore discourse and incorporated it into their analyses, yet only as an epiphenomenon. Today the new generation of sociologists, including Andrew Abbott, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Robert Wuthnow, and William Labov, increasingly recognizes the inseparability of both structures.

As to the second goal of the book, much needs to be done because diachronic structures have long been ignored, and the promise of structuralism in this regard has yet to be fulfilled, although almost a century has passed since its first formalization in the work of Saussure. Saussure proposed two types of structures on the time axis: synchronic and diachronic. He also proposed two other types of structures on the analytical-level axis: micro and macro. The matrix produced by these four dimensions summarizes Saussure's strategy with respect to structural query. Structuralists from the humanities and the social sciences have neglected the diachronic structures, for the most part, and concentrated on the analytical-level axis. Presently, however, any attempt to couple discursive and social patterns needs to take into consideration the temporal constraints involved in discursive and social action. The synchronic approach to the analysis of social and discursive actions is based on a hypothetical and inauthentic concept of social process because social and discursive actions alike are embedded within temporal structures that can be ignored only at a cost.

With the goal of bridging this gap and coupling the structures of speech and action, I extend the query about structures in the discursive and social processes to the persistent patterns in their ceaseless interaction. I argue that without an uninterrupted synergy between discursive and social structures, daily social life would be impossible to imagine. With a focus on the patterns in the interface, I offer a new explanation, on both the macro and the micro levels, for the construction of authority in a discourse network through time. More specifically, the question this work revolves around is why some social actors gain more aggregate or individual authority than others in a discourse network.

I extend, in the course of doing that, the application of current methods of synchronic (cross-sectional) social network analysis to diachronic (cross-temporal) social networks. Presently, social network analysis concentrates primarily on synchronic structures and uses cross-sectional data. In turn, I relate my findings on diachronic social networks to the research on cross-sectional social networks or social organizations in general. In doing this, I have as my purpose to demonstrate how the study of cross-sectional networks and the study of cross-temporal networks can mutually give rise to each other.

Narrative Social Structure also maintains that structuralist query in the humanities can foster that in the social sciences, and vice versa. The search for patterns in discursive mechanisms has long been carried out in isolation from that in social mechanisms, and the relationship between the two has until recently been ignored. Currently, the gap between the two strands of structuralist query has become increasingly noticeable on both sides. I claim this territory for myself and argue that social behavior can be better explained and predicted if an approach is employed that explores the interaction between social and discursive patterns.

The empirical evidence from the analysis of the hadith transmission network substantiates my claims. It is the longest social network in history ever to be recorded in such great detail, from the seventh century to the present. Hadith includes all primary records concerning the Prophet Muhammad (571-632 CE) and is precisely defined as follows: "Hadith (narrative, talk) with the definite article (al-hadith) is used for Tradition, being an account of what the Prophet said, or did, or of his tacit approval of something said or done in his presence." The Prophet Muhammad, born in Mecca, declared in 610 that he was the Messenger of God and invited people to Islam until his death in Medina. His flight from Mecca to Medina in 622, called the Hijrah, is considered the beginning of the Islamic calendar. Hadith literature, which consists of the anthologies of a great number of brief anecdotes and sayings of Muhammad, is the second source of Islam after the Qur'an, which, according to Muslims, comprises the direct revelations of God. Presently, more than a billion Muslims all over the world turn to hadith literature when they want to study and emulate the exemplary life and conduct of the Prophet Muhammad, commonly known as the Sunnah, meaning literally "tradition."

A hadith (the plural is "ahadith") is a brief disjointed narrative about the Prophet Muhammad transmitted orally and in writing through an extensively recorded network of narrators across generations. A generation is also called a layer (tabaqa) in the diachronic social network of hadith scholars, known as muhaddithun. Only layers 1-26 of the hadith transmission network, extending from 610 to 1505 CE, are analyzed here, with a focus on the most prominent 1,226 narrators (see fig. 1.1) who had 13,712 connections among themselves. The beginning, 610, corresponds to the date Muhammad proclaimed his divine mission in Mecca, and the end, 1505, corresponds to the death in Egypt of the last prominent master of hadith, Suyuti. Geographically, the network served in the dissemination of Islamic knowledge from Spain, Africa, and the Balkans to central Asia and eastern Turkistan up to China and contributed to the integration of Islamic creed and practice.

The network of the most prominent hadith scholars, which is the focus of this book, comprised the most celebrated stratum among colleagues known as huffaz. This word is the plural of hafiz, which literally means "the guardian," "the one who memorizes and protects." The term hafiz may also be used to refer to the people who committed Qur'anic scripture as a whole to memory, but that is not the meaning used here. The network of huffaz expanded with the spread of Islam until the tenth century CE, which corresponds to layer 11, around the fourth century after the Hijrah (ah), more precisely from 180 to 348 ah or 796-930 CE. The number of huffaz reached its peak in layer 11, with 117 scholars. This number suddenly dropped to 77 scholars in layer 12, to 79 scholars in layer 13, and to 74 scholars in layer 14. From layer 15 on, the decrease in the number of huffaz became even more drastic: 31 scholars in layer 15, 10 scholars in layer 21, and only 1 scholar in layer 26. The curve is skewed to the left and has a tail to the right. This is significant because the left-hand side represents the era of authority formation, whereas the right-hand shows the era of authority claiming. Therefore, the flatness of the right-hand side and the eventual drop-off to zero are striking.

Being the longest of its kind in existence, the hadith transmission network can be used to explore longitudinal processes in social networks through time. The particular focus here is on exploring authority formation in a cross-temporal network. The analysis of the network of hadith scholars over centuries shows that interlayer brokerage (the ILB effect) and levels of reported speech (the LRS effect) work together uninterruptedly, on the macro and micro levels, to shape the social network and the behavior of the individual and aggregate social actors. These findings confirm the old structuralist tenet, developed earlier by Karl Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Parsons, Robert Merton, Ronald Burt, and White, that structural position is a better predictor of social action. Structural positions, however, are not merely a product of nontemporal social relations; rather, they are constructed temporally through discursive action.

Discursive action manifests itself in narrative or stories of countless types and lengths, implicitly assumed or actually told-entirely or in part. My approach to narrative in this study is external; I do not attempt to interpret the content of the narrative. Nor do I analyze how narrative has been interpreted and used in variable ways. Instead, I analyze the relation of narrative to the social network to which it gives life and form, and also through which it survives and disseminates. This approach concentrates more on the conditions that are vital for meaning to be possible. In line with this view, my interest is not solely in the conventional question of what narrative means or reflects but in what narrative does socially. The former question is based on the traditional referential approach to language use, which conceives of language only as a means of communication. However, this traditional referential paradigm has been recently expanded to other aspects of language use as well. Among them is the role of language use and discursive practices in establishing and maintaining social relations.

I maintain that there are persistent patterns conceivable to us in social and discursive processes, and in their interaction. These patterns are called structures. There has been a long tradition of query for such patterns in the human sciences, led by Saussure, M. M. Bakhtin, Roland Barthes, Michael Silverstein, and John Lucy. A similar research tradition in the social sciences has been led by Marx, Weber, Durkheim, George Simmel, Merton, White, and Burt. In the structuralist tradition, the explanation lies in the patterns of interrelations between the elements of an organization, discursive or social, micro or macro, synchronic or diachronic. I cross-fertilize these currently isolated structuralist traditions from linguistics, the humanities, and the social sciences and bring recent developments in all these fields to bear upon each other. From this perspective, I suggest in the following chapters that not only the relations within the discursive and social processes, uncoupled from each other, but also the interrelations between them should be a subject for structuralist query. An unexplored territory lies between the traditionally well established intellectual borders of the human and social sciences.

With the purpose of substantiating my claim, I empirically demonstrate how metalanguage implicitly configures our social networks whether we are aggregate or individual social actors. In my analysis of the hadith transmission network, I have found that a layer, a cohort of prominent scholars from one generation, is thinly connected to itself but thickly connected to past and future layers. Outward connections figure prominently in the network of preeminent scholars. Fewer than 3 percent of the total number of teacher ties are inward, that is, to teachers who are peers from the same layer. In contrast, more than 97 percent of ties are outward, that is, to earlier and later layers. These patterns, which I have analyzed below in greater detail on the macro and micro levels, persisted over nine centuries, from 610 to 1505. From a social network perspective, the role of prominent scholars in the hadith transmission network can be characterized as that of interlayer brokerage (again, the ILB effect), which brings them power. Yet the reason why prominent peers limit their connections to each other can be found in the discursive mechanisms involved in reported speech (again, the LRS effect).

Figure 1.2 illustrates how this phenomenon manifests itself in the hadith transmission network. In the interconnections of 26 layers observed here, only a very limited number of connections are to peers from the same layer. More concretely, only 880 (6.4 percent) of the total of 13,712 connections are inward, or synchronic, whereas 12,832 (93.6 percent) are outward, or diachronic. Yet the ratio of synchronic connections to diachronic connections never exceeds 3 percent. This demonstrates that promising hadith students persistently avoided inward or in-layer connections with their peers by not accepting their narrative, because this would have increased the levels of reported speech unnecessarily. The forward-looking investment for a student was, as much as possible, in teacher connections to nonadjacent layers. Similarly, the foresighted investment for a prominent mentor was in students from the youngest possible layers.

The question of authority formation in the scholarly community has far-reaching implications for culture and society. The authority of the huffaz, who were part of the leading intellectual community of their time, known as the ulama, was not limited to the hadith transmission network. They were also highly influential both in the intellectual community and in Islamic society in general. Since there is no formal central authority in the Islamic community, the role of the ulama is crucial for the working of society. The authority of the ulama is increasingly drawing the attention of students of Islamic society. By comparison with some other religious communities that are more familiar to sociologists, Islam lacks an authoritative central figure or institution like the church. Some may see the lack of a central authoritative institution as a weakness for Islamic society. Yet Richard Bulliet's recent exploration shows that in the absence of a single authority there have been multiple forms and sources of authority in Islamic society and culture: the Companions of the Prophet; the scholars, or ulama; and the saintly figures, or sufis (Bulliet 1994).

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Excerpted from Narrative Social Structureby RECEP SENTURK Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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