Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Aknowledgement
10 Christian Giordano The first point that needs to be stressed is undoubtedly their inflexibility and static nature. By working only with notions such as the above-mentioned, one always ends up considering the society as a highly integrated and lasting system, thus barring one’s chance to conceptualise mutations, tensions and conflicts within a group (Boissevain 1974: 9 fn.). On the other hand, through these analytical tools the individuals of a collective are essentially confined within an unchanging, as well as ineluctable, iron cage and can only act in conformity with the norms created by the system. However, this is clearly a myth that reduces human action to something genuinely ideal and therefore non-existent in empirical reality (Boissevain 1974: 18). Boissevain’s rebuttal to the functionalist and structural-functionalist paradigm criticises the unrealistic abstraction by which these social sciences have described and interpreted social action in the societies they studied. At the same time, explicitly following Frederik Barth (Barth 1966: 5), he stresses the need for both a processual and pragmatic approach by which social anthropologists may investigate how social forms are produced (Boissevain, 1974: 19). Obviously, this can also be understood as a criticism to Émile Durkheim’s sociologism and a clear though implicit reference to Georg Simmel’s formal sociology besides Leopold von Wiese’s science of social relations - the well-known Beziehungslehre - can be perceived. The second point concerns the individual’s nature as a social actor. If functionalists assume that people act essentially according to settled, learned, accepted, and sanctioned rules of behaviour, according to Boissevain and his associates theoretically men are above all transactional animals who permanently evaluate what is good or bad for them and act accordingly (Boissevain 1974: 6). The members of a society therefore are not robots who are unable to judge their circumstances. They should rather be regarded as consciously moral beings on the one hand, and as skilled situation manipulators on the other: i.e. as expert administrators of their own resources (Boissevain 1974: 8). We can already detect the clear proximity with theoretic perspectives such as George Herbert Mead’s social behaviorism, Herbert Blumer’s sym-
