Networks and multilevel anthropology, summary: Networks connect people, creating conduits of linkage
for flows of goods, services, and personnel, and establishing boundaries and social spaces where local
societies meet states and polities. In the 1950's-60's, Leach was among the first anthropologists to detail
empirical patterns of networked relations in the context of ethnographic cases (e.g., Kachin) and their
material environments, with special emphasis on networks in which property, exchange, and political
relations are embedded (Tambiah 2002:150). Most significant were his detailed ethnographic analyses of
Pul Eliya (1961) and of the effects of British rule. Wolf (1982) demonstrated the importance of studying
societies as networks, pulled also into the orbits of an expanding world-system, often via colonialism and
exacerbated with post-colonialism. Many anthropologists have focused since on historical changes
wrought by colonialism, trade, war, contact, labor, and migration. Much of formal network theory
developed outside anthropology in the social and physical sciences. By the 1990's a range of new tools,
models and methods emerge for studying organizational networks (Leaf 2009: 79-80) that give more
detailed and complete network analysis of the variable and complex ties within communities and beyond.
The Intellectual Merit of this project complements these advances with network methods in the context
of ethnographic case studies. The PI developed multilevel pgraphs and –with mathematicians Batagelj
and Mrvar (2008, White et al. 1999)– the analytical/visual computer software to easily enter, order and
analyze multiple complex network properties and ties developing over time. This and related approaches
are now used extensively by White and others (e.g., Houseman and White 1998a, 1998b) who began the
empirical study of network dynamics mapped over kin ties in a range of societies at different levels of
scale. A major development reviewed by Wolfe (2006) and noted by Leaf (2009:167-173), in his Human
Organization and Social Theory, was White and Johansen’s (2005) book on network ties among the
Aydιnlι nomads of Turkey, in which White overlaid ethnographic data on migration, changing economic
positions of families and emergent political leadership –from Johansen's years of fieldwork among the
Aydιnlι– onto kin ties mapped across generations. Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems:
Process Models of a Turkish Clan is a key book in the advancement of formal network theory and
analysis for ethnography. New case-study network databases such as Goodenough’s “Chuuk” are among
the 80+ cases now archived at our Kinsources site (2010: with others coming online) that provide the
project with ethnographic data for many communities that are sufficient to analyze a very wide range of
social networks. Network analysis provides generational orderings that approximate successive historical
periods, allowing study of impacts of changes in larger world-system networks (see Wolf 1982) on local
regions and communities. With new network datasets from ethnographic fieldwork, including Kinsources
(2010), the data for this project will not only equip a new anthropological repository for data for new
forms of study on networks and their multiple properties but provide new instructional software for
anthropologists and social scientists to carry these studies out.
Broader Impacts. There is enormous benefit to anthropology and the human sciences generally to the
methodologies provided in this project: the ability to estimate potential causal effects and test hypotheses
about causal nets and factors shaping change in specific communities and world regions. To test
hypotheses, we provide the tools to study multilevel "peer effects" of networks for communities at
different levels of scale in case-by-case focus on networks alongside more standard ethnographic data as a
basis for comparisons of organizational structure, histories, modes of adaptation and contact in various
periods. The network-overlay analyses in multiple communities, building on an analytic framework to
study multilevel social processes and concomitant material/economic conditions is applied to three
samples: foragers, with two fundamental levels, within and between families, in their kinship networks;
societies with domesticated plants and animals, with networks connecting denser settlements that
intensify the “peer effects” of interaction between populations; and the globalizing networks of trade and
diffusion of information and technology. The project offers open source educational and research tools to
study effects of common history, proximities, and world-system network dynamics on sample
communities worldwide, the training of graduate and undergraduates at UCI and the Santa Fe Institute in
use of these tools, and diffusion of these resources to other universities and institutions. The methods
themselves and methods of validation have been vetted at SFI, and means of electronic dissemination
provided at UC Irvine and SFI.