Social Networks, Cognition, and Culture [chapter]

Douglas R. White
2011 A Companion to Cognitive Anthropology  
NETWORKS Network studies are an important adjunct to further development of cognitive anthropology and theory. When reliable means of identifying relational properties of behavior, cognition, and cultural structures or systems are available they help overcome limitations of other types of descriptive studies, descriptive statistics, or ad hoc inferences about how mind, culture, and social behavior interact. Roles Roles form into key network and institutional structures which can be understood
more » ... relation to social processes. Network ethnography can also operate in this way to further understanding (White and Johansen 2006:ch. 1). Network studies enhance our understandings of cause and effects of emergent roles and their dynamical patterns of shifting stability, including hierarchy. Finding hierarchy and its network embeddings, for example, often depends on global as well as local information on how local patterns fit within global ones. Both the understanding of global network structure and analysis of micro-macro linkages are additional advantages. If we wanted to find the leaders in a large urban community (see Freeman et al. 1960) , for example, we could start from a sample of potential leaders, ask them who the leaders are, and iteratively construct a snowball sample of higher order leaders until finally a leader sub-network or evidence of a single leader emerges. Cohesive groups Cohesive groups have patterned interactions that are self-reinforcing and self-stabilizing in certain spatio-temporal frames. Study of these interactions can also account for individual choices, the emergence of cohesive units as socially and cognitively recognizable
doi:10.1002/9781444394931.ch18 fatcat:i6vuwnjldzccjnttyhszfbu3vu