Pathways and Chance

The role chance plays in understanding another person is considered in this essay, which uses Carlo Ginzburg’s amazing book, The Cheese and the Worms, as an example. For Ginzburg, the chance selection of data allows the researcher to shift standpoints, freeing himself of prior assumptions. What makes this possible? We postulate structure, as the ground of individual standpoints, and the basis for understanding action at a historic remove. To experience the world as driven by chance is to treat it as outside of explanation. Postulating structure entails that what actors experience as chance events reflects natural features of the pathways that they are on, pathways captured with minimal abstraction in their narratives. We exploit these ideas to see if we can identify how peasant culture is revealed as structure in The Cheese and the Worms.