a number of long-term ethnographic sites are being studied by researchers affiliated with the Linkages projects funded by the NSF -- Carinthian, Tlaxcalan, Tzintzuntzan and Turkish nomad communities that are the focus of our group at Cologne (Johansen, Schnegg), SMU (Kemper), CalTech (Scudder, Lee), UCB (Colson) and UCI (White, Brudner). French, Spanish, Swiss, North- and Meso-American elites and networked institutions that are a second focus of collaborative work at EHESS and INED (Paris), Geneva and IIMAS (Mexico).
Santa Fe Institute projects that are the focus of the State and Markets working group -- the biotech industry (Powell Koput and Owen-Smith) and Renaissance Florence (Padgett)-- and of the complex network dynamics working group.
I've attached a guide to pages linked to this site that give some of my work and that of network colleagues at UCI, as well as to some of the resources (many open for student research, given project objectives, which include sites for continuing fieldwork with existing databases) that I've put together on networks, scientific visualization, longitudinal fieldsite and network ethnography, and cross-cultural comparisons. Here, for a prospective grad student, is some summer reading in mathematical anthropology and mathematical modeling of human society.
My current work on social networks, social action/organization, and complex adaptive systems operates across various debates among paradigms in social science. At one end of the debate, methodological individualism frames policy agendas in economics and political science by sole emphasis on individual agency, as if there is no society, no history (but with interesting bottom-up agent-based simulations). At the end, the structuralist view of social facts goes too far in the opposite direction, and is overly aggregative. The structural-Durkheimian view ignores the dynamics of relations, asserting the efficacy of societal forms through the vehicle of norms as if norms were static functions of social groups.
The approach to social science I call cultural kinetics offers a more dynamic view of co-emergence of structure and process. It begins with the materiality of relations, and explores varieties of networks and networks of networks, focuses on concrete relations among individuals and groups. Emphasizing dynamic processes, structure is abstracted only after analysis. This approach incorporates insights from sociology, anthropology and formal models so as to accomodate the effects of emergent structure out of multiple agent and multiple relations.
