Narratives and Interaction:

Abstract

States and national movements discuss and conceive their interactions with others as narratives, which are stories with heroes, villains and a plot. The building blocks of these narratives are the categories of agent, character and acts, which are defined by constitutive rules. By maintaining narratives, actors are able to construct situations, make judgements about the intentions of other actors, and decide upon a course of action, all in a parsimonious way. Actors must assimilate concrete actions into their narratives by construing them as acts, which are components of the narratives. I provide an account of constitutive rules and social cognitive processes of inference by which actions are construed as acts. I show that in late colonial India the Muslim League constructed a narrative of betrayal by the Congress and was guided by it to call in 1940 for the creation of separate Muslim homelands.