Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Aknowledgement
Studying networks nowadays. On the utility of a notion 9 Studying networks nowadays. On the utility of a notion Christian Giordano The book Friends of Friends. Networks, Manipulators and Coalitions by Jeremy Boissevain was first published in the now distant 1974. At the time it had a widespread impact in the field of social anthropology (Anglo-Saxon and beyond) especially amongst researchers who where then interested in Europe’s peripheral regions. Resuming in a more empirically cogent way some interesting and important ideas developed by F.G. Bailey in his Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics (published in 1969) and other subsequent publications (Bailey 1971, 1973), in this work the author endeavoured to formulate a new approach to social analysis based upon the notion of network. If we examine the theoretic assumptions inherent to Boissevain’s project more in detail, we can detect quite a radical criticism to some basic concepts that have won fame to the functionalist perspective of British anthropology and the structural-functionalist paradigm in American sociology (cf. Talcot Parsons and Robert K. Merton). More specifically, we might add that Boissevain (just as Bailey himself besides some eminent representatives of the Manchester school including Victor Turner, J. Clyde Mitchell, and John A. Barnes) at the time carried out a close examination of established and so to speak almost sacred notions as institution, structure and corporate group, which in social anthropology had been popularised even by two such founding fathers as Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. Carrying out researches in the Mediterranean area (mainly Malta and Sicily), Boissevain had become aware that these basic notions were not fully adequate for an analysis of these societies (Boissevain and Mitchell 1973). In fact, at least under two aspects these concepts were found quite wanting.
