Embeddedness of Ethnographic Cases: A Social Networks Perspective

As the world becomes more complex, the work of anthropology, both theoretical and practical, becomes more demanding. People at the local level are increasingly being drawn into larger circuits through economic linkages, demographic processes, social interactions, and flows of information that transcend local and national boundaries. Such global linkages and the new embeddedness they produce require more sophisticated approaches to ethnography. This paper proposes social network analysis as a valuable approach to that end. The concept of embeddedness, which is central to the social networks perspective, is introduced. Hierarchical embeddedness of the local level in the larger society, economy, and polity is distinguished from domain embeddedness, the interpenetration of different fields of activity. Network studies of two ethnographic cases, gift giving among !Kung and ritual celebrations in a Javanese village, illustrate the potential of social network analysis for investigating embeddedness. The paper concludes with substantive and methodological suggestions for the study of embeddedness.