What Is an Event?

By Robin Wagner-Pacifici

We live in a world of breaking news, where at almost any moment our everyday routine can be interrupted by a faraway event. Events are central to the way that individuals and societies experience life. Even life’s inevitable moments—birth, death, love, and war—are almost always a surprise. Inspired by the cataclysmic events of September 11, Robin Wagner-Pacifici presents here a tour de force, an analysis of how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing, everyday life, and how they then move across time and landscape.

What Is an Event? ranges across several disciplines, systematically analyzing the ways that events emerge, take shape, gain momentum, flow, and even get bogged down. As an exploration of how events are constructed out of ruptures, it provides a mechanism for understanding eventful forms and flows, from the micro-level of individual life events to the macro-level of historical revolutions, contemporary terrorist attacks, and financial crises. Wagner-Pacifici takes a close look at a number of cases, both real and imagined, through the reports, personal narratives, paintings, iconic images, political posters, sculptures, and novels they generate and through which they live on. What is ultimately at stake for individuals and societies in events, Wagner-Pacifici argues, are identities, loyalties, social relationships, and our very experiences of time and space. What Is an Event? provides a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting upon them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of the events that mark and shape our lives.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 24, 2017
• ISBN: 9780226439815

Book preview

What Is an Event?

What Is an Event?

Robin Wagner-Pacifici

The University of Chicago Press Chicago     &  London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2017.

Printed in the United States of America

26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43964-8 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43978-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43981-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226439815.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wagner-Pacifici, Robin Erica, author.

Title: What is an event? / Robin Wagner-Pacifici.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016029268| ISBN 9780226439648 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226439785 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226439815 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Events (Philosophy) | Events (Philosophy)—Social aspects. | Social sciences and history.

Classification: LCC B105.E7 W34 2017 | DDC 302/.1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016029268

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To my mother and to the memory of my father

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Why a Book about Events?

Advances and Limitations of Existing Scholarship

Form and Flow

1  •  Political Semiosis

Inside or Outside

Deconstructing Political Semiosis

Summary

2  •  Ground

L’Origine du Monde: Birth

Et in Arcadia Ego: Death

Background

Ground as Surface, Point of Contact, Scene of Action

Underground and Overground

3  •  Rupture

Suspended Animation

Time and Space in Rupture

Event and Series: The Financial Crisis of 2008

The Trigger Gave

4  •  Resonating Forms

Violence and Event Formation

The French Revolution

Jacques-Louis David: Eventful Moments and the Pause

5  •  Fragmenting Forms

The Representational Uncertainty of the Paris Commune

Styles and Genres of the Paris Commune

Formal Fault Lines of Il Quarto Stato

6  •  Sedimentation and Drift

9/11

Sedimentation and the Official Report

Insiders and Outsiders

Event Spaces

9/11 in Lower Manhattan

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Plates

Preface

This book was propelled into life by an event, the event that became known as 9/11 (or September 11) in the United States. The shadow of 9/11 is cast over the book and pervades its pages. As an event, it still presses at the limits of recognition by constantly shifting gears and shifting ground. It has taken shape as terrorist attacks, national trauma, transformed legal landscapes, international religio-cultural battles, and armed warfare. Thus, the book is partly a result of my attempt to wrap my mind around that event, and it will make the case that now, having been written, the book is part of the very event it seeks to comprehend.

But even as 9/11 hovers over the project, the book stakes out a distinct approach to events generally. It neither restricts its analysis to one specific historical event nor remains satisfied to engage in a form of philosophical theorizing that rarely makes contact with specific eventful ruptures and turning points. Rather, the book moves back and forth between the particular and the general, between events experienced with all their vivid, pulsating, and demanding realities, and events understood systematically and theoretically. Working with events, the book builds a model for analyzing them.

What Is an Event? aims to grasp the complex lived experiences of events in the making. It seeks to take apart and peer into the inner workings, the mechanisms, of events. To do this, it scales up to the level of major historical events and scales down to the micro level of ruptures in individual lives, relationships, and interactions. It analyzes how events erupt and take off from the ground of ongoing everyday life and how they then move across time and space.

Both real and imagined events form the backbone of the book. Exemplary images and cases are presented and examined. They include history paintings, iconic images, political posters, novels, personal narratives, documents of statecraft, and financial market gyrations. Each event exemplar serves to highlight some aspect or aspects of the dynamic nature of events. Each appears as its own complex world of forms, directions, and propositions about action and agency, each constructed by specific principles of identity, interaction, and change. Among them, the seventeenth-century painting Et in Arcadia Ego by Nicolas Poussin highlights the confusions of temporality when the event of death cannot be fixed firmly in a moment of the past or continuously experienced in the ongoing present; the great Michelangelo fresco The Last Judgment epitomizes the importance and conundrums of the threshold moment immediately before an (the, for many) event; the French Revolutionary painter Jacques-Louis David’s Intervention of the Sabine Women demonstrates the power of a pause in the flow of an event; and the portentous early twentieth-century emblem of labor struggles, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s painting Il quarto stato (The Fourth Estate), highlights the interruption of an event by another possible event or counterevent (and its eventual possible rejections or absorptions). Specific historical cases also make exemplary appearances: the Paris Commune epitomizes situations in which there is indeterminacy of identities, relations, and meanings, and 9/11 in Lower Manhattan is representative of what happens when an event gets caught in an inward-turning eddy of indecision. All exemplars are noteworthy, both for themselves and for their exemplification of one or another way that events emerge and take flight.

Events are central to the ways we experience life, both individually and collectively. But they are full of paradoxes. We seem to live for events—the breaking news of our mediated chronicling—even as we craft daily routines and aspire to predictability and continuity in our lives. We live and suffer through the startling events that are, for all their inevitability, also always a surprise: birth, death, love, war. The ultimate goal of What Is an Event? is to provide a way for us all—as social and political beings living through events, and as analysts reflecting on them—to better understand what is at stake in the formations and flows of events—at every stage of the process and on down the line.

Acknowledgments

I had the clear sense that I would write a book about events in 2012, during a particularly stimulating and idyllic two weeks of teaching Society and the Event in Wroclaw, Poland, at the Democracy and Diversity Summer Institute of the New School’s Transregional Center for Democratic Studies. My smart and intrepid international group of students all had events of their own from which to draw as we plied our way through readings by historians, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, and linguists. I owe a debt of thanks to my New School colleague Elzbieta Matynia for the invitation to join this summer program, and to my students there for that opportunity to think about the event in tandem with them.

Over the next four years, many colleagues, friends, and students continued that conversation about events with me. I thank them all for their interest, their ideas, and their indulgence of my preoccupation with this topic: Jeffrey Alexander, Andrew Arato, Claudio Benzecry, Mathieu Berger, Ronald Breiger, Daniel Dayan, Irit Dekel, James Dodd, Roger Friedland, Jeffrey Goldfarb, Bruce Grant, Elihu Katz, Martina Low, Terence McDonnell, James Miller, John Mohr, Jeffrey Olick, Janet Roitman, Magali Sarfatti Larson, Michael Schober, Thomas Scheffer, Iddo Tavory, Anna Lisa Tota, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Patrizia Violi, and Barbie Zelizer.

Bruce Grant provided a critically stringent and generous reading of the entire manuscript, and I hope my emendations achieved some of the goals he quite rightly established for the book. I thank as well the two reviewers for the University of Chicago Press who provided detailed critiques encouraging important revisions.

What Is an Event? also benefited from the valuable questions and criticisms of audiences at the following institutions: George Mason University, CUNY Graduate Center, University of Notre Dame, Universita di Bologna, University of Haifa, University of Tel Aviv, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, University of Louvain, University of Brussels, University of Liège, Sofia University, Technische Universität of Berlin, Humboldt University of Berlin, Yale University, University of Virginia, Columbia University, and the New School.

Manuela Badilla Rajevic, my fantastic graduate student research assistant at the New School, helped track down a critical permission. Kyle Adam Wagner at the University of Chicago Press provided extraordinarily clear and efficient assistance in shepherding the manuscript. I thank Doug Mitchell with my accustomed encomiums to his intelligence, erudition, insight, and enthusiasm. He is as astute a reader as an author can ever hope to have.

Finally, I want to acknowledge my Pacificis: my husband, Maurizio, for his true and enduring friendship, and our children, Adriano, Laura, and Stefano, whom we love and admire absolutely.

Revised portions of the following of my essays and articles appear throughout this text.

Introduction: The Inchoative Moment, Common Knowledge 19, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 28–39.

La difesa della nazione: Il rapporto della Commissione Federale ‘11 Settembre,’ in La Memoria Pubblica: Trauma culturale, nuovi confini e identita nazionali, edited by Marita Rampazi and Anna Lisa Tota (Turin: UTET, 2008), 24–40.

A Manifesto for a Sociology of Events, in From the Case Study of the Event. On the Principles of Historical Reasoning, special issue, Divinatio 39–40 (Spring–Summer 2015): 49–60.

Reconceptualizing Memory as Event: From ‘Difficult Pasts’ to ‘Restless Events,’ in the Routledge International Handbook of Memory Studies, edited by Anna Lisa Tota and Trever Hagen, 22–27 (London: Routledge Press, 2016).

Theorizing the Restlessness of Events, American Journal of Sociology 115, no. 5 (March 2010): 1–36.

Introduction

Crowds storm a building, thousands of protesters amass in a square, airplanes fly into skyscrapers, financial markets go into free fall. Such occurrences can set off a series of actions that only gradually and with difficulty cohere into an event that can be categorized, located in time and space, and given a name. In experiencing such rupturing moments, we may pause in our daily activities, consult communications media of various kinds, confer with each other, and feel somewhat dislocated and disoriented, even if we are distant from the points of rupture or immune from their immediate impact. The point is, we’re not sure. If we sense something eventful is happening, we may be both drawn in and repulsed by the prospect of a world transforming.

Historical events provoke an enormous sense of uncertainty. The world seems out of whack, and everyday routines are, at the least, disrupted. People often experience a vertiginous sensation that a new reality or era may be in the making, but it is one that does not yet have a clear shape and trajectory, or determined consequences. What Is an Event? provides insight into this complex dynamic of unknowing¹ and then reknowing a world transformed by events. And it does so through exemplars of such unknowing and reknowing.

For instance, sensations of eventful possibility and threat are vividly on display in the early twentieth-century painting by the Italian artist Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, Il quarto stato (The Fourth Estate; plate 1). A large group of agitated peasant laborers advance toward the painting’s foreground. They seem almost as if they were about to march right out of the painting itself—into our space and time. Clearly, there is an event-in-the-making—maybe a strike, maybe a protest, maybe some violent conflict. Many of the men’s hands and arms gesture broadly, indicating that the march’s directions and goals are still being forged and found. Nevertheless, a sense of solidarity pervades the scene. The group is compact and moving forward, led by two grim-faced men. And yet, there is something in the painting that is not quite set, not quite coherent. A barefoot woman, with a baby in her arms, enters the scene from some other dimension, some other world, or maybe even some other painting. Is she seeking to join the march? Is she a detractor from the march? Is she making a case for desisting from the march for the sake of her baby? All interpretations are possible. Her angled approach directs her toward the two men leading the group. They take no notice of her. Even as she gestures and looks to them, with her open and supplicating hand, they curl their hands inward and stick them in their shirts and pockets. They stare straight ahead. Their event is determinedly single-minded, moving in its unidirectional trajectory toward some point of confrontation. But anything can still happen in this incipient moment. It seems that anyone can step in from another dimension, another world, and the possibility is presented, however faint, that the event-in-the-making can change course or even emerge stillborn.

As an exemplary representation of the history of early twentieth-century labor struggles, Il quarto stato illuminates the contradictions of those struggles: the cohesion and the rifts, the solidarity and the marginalization, the progress and the possible detours.² The painting suggests that events are made through the efforts of gestures and speech that give them shape; through the performance of boundary making that includes and excludes participants; through the representation of identities that are recognized or ignored. Directions are chosen, identities are challenged and cast, cases for taking action are put forward, taken up, or contradicted. Individual and collective destinies are contingent upon all these actions. But the painting also highlights the ways that events are unpredictable—we do not know who is waiting to meet the advancing workers and what their responses will be. We do not know what the woman’s entreaties will ultimately bear. No one party, it seems, controls the course of events. Events are always a surprise.

Why a Book about Events?

Many of the events that I have analyzed over the course of my career, including the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades; the standoff at and destruction of the MOVE group’s house in Philadelphia; the standoff at and destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas; the surrender of Robert E. Lee to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox in Virginia; and the attacks of 9/11 in New York City, followed similar trajectories, with precipitant violent ruptures that were eventually labeled and historically cataloged.³ My recent work on events and their restlessness derives from my desire to go beyond analyzing individual cases and even beyond elaborating specific archetypal forms of events (viz. social dramas, standoffs, and surrenders) in order to build a model for the analysis of events in general. I have thus developed an analytical apparatus, termed political semiosis, for tracking the contingent ruptures, shapes, and flows of events. That apparatus, fully described in the next chapter, informs all the analyses of What Is an Event?

While a great deal of work on events has been done in such fields as history, philosophy, linguistics, and political theory, sociologists have been less focused on events than on structures and processes, given a disciplinary preoccupation with chronic conditions and long-term trends.⁴ The existing scholarship on events provides many illuminating angles of entry into them. What Is an Event? actively engages with this scholarship, but also goes beyond its tendencies to either focus on individual cases or remain at the level of high abstraction. Rather, What Is an Event? works through exemplary cases to model the emergence of event forms and track their flows, to scale down to the micro levels of individual interactions and up to the macro levels of collective transformation, and to incorporate actions in multiple modalities.⁵

Advances and Limitations of Existing Scholarship

The extant scholarly literature on events, from the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, with his concentration on the struggles and violence of world-historical events at the level of the state, to the philosopher Alain Badiou’s application of mathematical set theory to the singularity of such events as love, has considered the causes, meanings, and effects of events. It has done so even as events have come in and out of favor as legitimate objects of analysis, for a time being sidelined as irrelevant to the academic concern with long-term societal development.

Historians have been particularly interested in events, viewing them as, in the words of the French sociologist Christophe Prochasson, bright lights in the stream of time.⁶ Nevertheless, with the rise and dominance of the kind of historical analysis proposed after 1950 by Fernand Braudel and the French Annales school, in which long-term (longue durée) geological and socioeconomic processes replaced the event as the appropriate and privileged objects of historical analysis, events were viewed even by many historians as analytical distractions. The Annales school proponents were particularly critical of the focus on events in which great men led great military campaigns. But the 1980s and 1990s saw the return of the event as a meaningful object of analysis for historians, and a simultaneous uptick in interest in events by philosophers. Partly this was a function of various humanities and social science disciplines pressing on the interactional dynamic between structure and agency, and the role of meaning making as historical agents (beyond the great men) operated both with and against the social and cultural structural constraints of their times. Partly this was a function of a criticism of both the hierarchy of the temporal categories announced by the Annales school proponents (longue durée, cycles, events), privileging the longue durée over events, and a criticism of the inability to achieve a satisfactory liaison between these categories.⁷ Partly this was tied to a new interest in the way events are intrinsic to and inevitable in historical narratives, the ways that people actually live and recount history. And partly this was motivated by the actual experiences of scholars who lived through, and often participated in, such events as the student and worker uprisings of 1968 in France.⁸

These motivational forces thus led to a renewed interest in events. Each analyst took up one or another angle of vision onto events, and each contributed significant understanding of them. None has yet modeled events in the most general way, an admittedly difficult and even paradoxical task, given the pure singularity of events. The significant advances and remaining limitations in extant event analysis can be divided into the following four themes: (1) event temporality; (2) event singularity versus eventness—my own term for expressing what might be general about events, as opposed to what is singular about them; (3) event terminology; and (4) the form and flow dynamism of events. I’ll now discuss these themes as part of my review of the extant approaches to events.

Event Temporality

The renewed focus on the role of events in historical narratives, by such scholars as Paul Ricoeur and Hayden White, meant that the resurgence of interest in the event was accompanied by an elaborated exploration of event temporality. This raised all sorts of questions about the ability to theorize duration and change, to choose the right metrics for measuring the time of events, to see events as either gradual or punctuated—in essence to understand the kind of radical impact of events on our very sense of time.

If, as the philosopher Paul Ricoeur argued so forcefully in his magisterial work Time and Narrative, all historical narratives entail emplotment decisions about beginnings, middles, and ends, the gathered form and force of events necessarily play a major role in them.⁹ Key temporal stakes in eventful narratives include time horizons, time lines, and periodicity (e.g. the demarcating of epochs), tensed time (past, present, and future), and turning points in history.¹⁰ Questions raised include these: How do events mark or even make the present? How do they interrupt or end epochs? How do they change our sense of the possibilities of a future?

Returning to the painting Il quarto stato, we see several of these issues vividly illuminated. There is a clear immediacy to the painting, a sense that its present is a remarkable, potentially transformative moment in time. But the vanishing point of its darkened background horizon also suggests that this present moment emerges from a difficult past that both weighs on the group and propels it, while the shallow foreground suggests an uncertain, perhaps precipitous future. The forward massed movement of the workers reflects a linear sense of time—the story is one of progress. Yet the Madonna-like supplicating woman and baby introduce alternating temporal currents of both a cyclical time of reproduction and an eternal time of the divine. Different time lines intersect, then, with potentially disruptive consequences for the event-in-the-making. We feel the shock of these waves crashing against each other.

This painting thus presents multiple temporalities without—for the moment that it captures—forcing a choice among them. Perhaps that frozen moment even forestalls a choice and stops time. Alternatively, given its own formal properties, a linguistic narrative of this scene would feature a linear temporality moving from past to future and, as Hayden White has written, in so doing give formal coherence to the virtual chaos of events.¹¹ In any case, there is a clear preoccupation (sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit) in bounding events in time and space. This is a major problem in the scholarship on events. My advance on this problem, elaborated in this book, is to emphasize and analyze the ongoingness of events, the ways they are restless and the ways they are subject to continuing oscillations between bounding and unbounding as they extend in time and space.

One largely sociological initiative that somewhat unwittingly reproduces the tendency to analytically cauterize events is that of memory studies. Many studies of collective memory assume that the events being memorialized are finished, and thus that the memorials are not, themselves, actual elements of the event. I would argue that memory studies in sociology has been a mechanism for smuggling events into a discipline more focused on long-term conditions and disinclined to focus on social ruptures and crystallizing moments. Memory studies or collective memory studies, typically concentrating on museums, monuments, memorials, and political speeches, manage to absorb their original precipitating events by declaring them finished. They have done so largely through the aegis of analyzing objects that anchor events in space and time—monumental stones, ruins, memorials, inquisitional hearings, and commemorations.¹² In the alternative approach being developed in this study, the memorial, the speech, the stone, the museum, are understood as only provisionally congealed moments of the events themselves, with variable shaping impacts on them.

This way of understanding events accords with processual approaches, such as those developed by the pragmatists and the phenomenologically oriented analysts for whom temporality is paramount. A prime exponent of this processual perspective is Andrew Abbott, one of the few sociologists explicitly engaged in the theorization of events. In many publications, Abbott has explored the multiple relations among temporality, events, and practices in society and in social sciences. Extrapolating a retort to the way studies of memory petrify events through assessing the way objects memorialize them, Abbott might argue that Cartesian, enduring objects like stones and human individuals are simply events that keep happening the same way.¹³

Abbott’s important work on temporality, events, and process indicates the unresolved problem of linkages among the three Braudelian times of history: structure, conjuncture, and event. It also insists, in a critical assessment of the work of narrative, that any narrativist analysis of events deals with multiple sequences of differing speeds, and that the multiple time-horizon problem remains the central theoretical barrier to moving formalized narrative beyond the simpleminded analysis of stage processes and rational action sequences.¹⁴ This deep engagement with the way that time and events are co-constitutive leads Abbott to a detailed deconstruction of accounts of events based on clock or tensed time.¹⁵ Such a deconstruction carries forward the project of attending to the ontological capacities and epistemological assumptions of these discrete forms (which ultimately, for Abbott, includes an antinarrative embrace of the lyric mode of sociological writing).¹⁶ For example, Abbott considers how eventful turning points operate differently in different orderings of time (e.g. discrete or continuous) as either abrupt moments out of continuity or as transitions between probability regimes.¹⁷ What remains missing from Abbott’s analysis of events is precisely what he identifies as missing from Braudel’s different historical temporalties: the identification of mechanisms that manage the linkage among them.

There is considerable agreement that a mutually constitutive relationship exists between time and events, whether we look at events from the perspective of temporality or look at time from the perspective of events. Events emerge and punctuate lived experience. What is needed is an approach that recognizes and interrelates the forms and the flows of this punctuated process of lived time, an approach that identifies the modes of and mechanisms for processing the processual.¹⁸

Event Singularity versus Eventness

Many scholarly studies of events are haunted by the episodic quality of a specific occurrence and consequently forego a systematic analysis of events. Reasonably, an exclusive focus on one event, for example the French Revolution, would not seem to lend itself to generalization. It’s the striking specific details of such world-historical ruptures that draw attention to them in the first place. But here’s the irony—the French Revolution is exhibit A of historical events under the revolutionary frame. From Edmund Burke to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Jean-Paul Sartre to William Sewell Jr. to Alain Badiou, writers have been taken with both the specificities of the actions that became The French Revolution and the way this event exemplifies revolutionary events generally.

Nevertheless, if the scholarly questions put to events regard their causality, significance, and consequences, it is precisely the individual nature of any given event that is of interest.¹⁹ What conditions led to this event? How did it break forth? How did it change the course of history? Such are the questions many historians have posed of their singular objects of analysis. Thus, the revived interest in events among historians has often lacked a concomitant interest in developing an overarching theorization of events (with exceptions like William Sewell Jr., whose analytical approach will be discussed throughout the book).

On the other hand, philosophical and linguistic explorations of events have illuminated the complex interactions between time, space, and events; between cognition, perception, and events; and between subjectivity, identity, and events.²⁰ These examinations help bring us close to the actual, often confusing and confounding, impressions and experiences of eventful life at both the individual and the social levels. But such investigations are also often characteristically abstract as they attempt to grasp the perceptions, cognitions, and emotions that events evoke without burrowing into the details of a chosen case. Thus, it can be hard to connect such analyses to actual historical events. So philosophical analyses of events can suffer from the obverse limitation from that of historical analyses—that is, they are unable to see the trees for the forest, the specific details for the general experience of them. The challenge is to craft an analysis that provides a way to get both forest and trees in focus.

With events, then, there is the genuine epistemological problem of generalizing the singular. Events are surprising and compelling precisely because they are unique, resisting absorption into everyday life. They shock and move us with their unpredictable specificity. But I maintain that all events are made by active agents using specific mechanisms, and that these mechanisms must be understood as universal. Universalizing a theory of events does not mean adopting a teleological or deterministic theory of history. It means detailing mechanisms and practices by which events are contingently formed and mobilized.

Event Terminology

In the social sciences of the late twentieth century, contrasting (but sometimes dually constituting) vocabularies of structure and agency and structure and event became popular. They aimed to explain how social life could be both constraining and gravity-like but also provide opportunities for social beings to exert effort and act with more or less free will. Within this framework, events could be viewed as hinge elements shaking up structures through agentic actions. A secular and linear concept of time was required for this structure and agency dynamic.

Relatedly, in the discipline of anthropology, a contrast was drawn between structure and event because of the focus on ritual continuity in many anthropological studies. As Daniel Hoffman and Stephen Lubkemann note, Anthropology was once famously described as the history of ‘non-events’ . . . a discipline focused on structural continuities and their social reproduction.²¹ This also follows from an early anthropological assumption that the small-scale, preindustrial societies that were the primary sites for study were embedded in a more cyclical than linear temporality. Coming from anthropology, perhaps it’s no accident that Pierre Bourdieu’s most famous concept of habitus is ontologically uneventful! However, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, famous for his studies of the visits of Captain Cook to the Hawaiian Islands in the eighteenth century, rejected what he calls the exaggerated opposition between structure and event in anthropology and history in favor of a stress on historical contingency.²² With