Abstract
Readers of Structure & Dynamics will appreciate Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems by Douglas White and Ulla Johansen because it takes the very best in mathematical approaches to social structure and applies them to real data of significant scale over a period of many decades. The book represents a perfect combination of ethnographic method, using detailed professional observations over many decades (1956-1995) with analysis using highly advanced network modeling, graph theory, and, in the estimation of this reviewer, unexcelled computational expertise. The association of three highly unusual factors—years of genealogical information, years of observing and recording a people’s marriages and migrations, and an interest in constructing scientific explanatory statements about the social structures that emerge as these natural and cultural processes unfold—results in a unique book. In theoretical interest, it has something in common with two foundational works that set off years of anthropological wrangling about kinship, George Peter Murdock’s Social Structure (1949) and Claude Levi-Strauss’ Elementary Structures of Kinship (1969, original French version in 1949). What seems to have prompted mathematical anthropologist and network analyst Douglas White to team up with more traditional ethnographer Ulla Johansen was the possibility of using her incredibly detailed knowledge of Turkish nomads’ social activities over several generations to try to resolve the most vexing problems of those two opposing theoretical systems. The result of the collaboration between White and Johansen is a book that, like those two earlier efforts, will undoubtedly serve as a take-off point for many other scholars to follow. In addition to its contribution to our understanding of kinship theory in a quite new way, this book makes an outstanding contribution by reintroducing ethnographers to the network perspective. Fifty years ago, social anthropologists J. A. Barnes and Elizabeth Bott introduced network analysis into ethnography. Their initial steps made it possible for J. Clyde Mitchell to cut an exciting path that was soon followed by other British social anthropologists, revealing how valuable network analysis could be, especially in the study of urbanization of African populations. The end of the formal colonial era slowed social anthropological research in Africa in the decades following 1960. Also, changes in the interests of anthropologists in the English-speaking world, such as the reduction of interest in comparative social structures and cultures, coupled with rising interest in qualitative interpretive ethnography, left the field of social network analysis to be developed by sociologists and organizational scientists. Douglas White, however, is one of a small number of anthropologists who developed the mathematical expertise necessary to make a genuine contribution to network analysis of complex systems through combining graph theory, long-term fieldwork, and the electronic computation required to deal with masses of quantitative data. These are the skills he brought to this work, putting this book at the cutting edge of network studies, regardless of discipline. So, even those who are not interested in Turkish nomads, per se, may find this book of great value. Whether the reader is interested in kinship, in economics, in politics or history, this book might be considered must reading. However, it isn’t easy reading. Although the book is well-written, the subject matter is very complex and multidimensional. It contains many necessary tables and figures. It even gives “url” addresses to color-coded figures that are available only on the web, figures so complex that they cannot be understood without the color coding. Something that some readers may not understand is that although most graphic illustrations appear in only two dimensions, graph theory is designed to explain
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