Torsello, Davide - Pappová, Melinda: Social Networks in Movement. Time, interaction and interethnic spaces in Central Eastern Europe - Nostra Tempora 8. (Somorja-Dunaszerdahely, 2003)
Aknowledgement
12 Christian Giordano awkward; in other words, it is no longer anthropologically correct Regarding the social actor as a manipulator, as if he were a Machiavelli of everyday life, becomes a repugnant way of conceiving social reality. These last observations seem to be backed above all by two indications that I think should not be underestimated. Concerning the first indication, we should recall that from the mid 1980s, maybe due to the so-called crisis of anthropological representations as well as the postmodernist turningpoint, there has been a growing loss of interest in the systematic study of patronage relations, of the various forms of coalition (dyadic and polyadic), and of conflict within groups with strongly personalised internal relations (factionalism). However, this has led to leaving aside the themes for which the notion of network had been particularly useful. On the one hand, we can concur with the criticisms to these studies - for example with Michael Herzfeld’s (Herzfeld 1992: 17 fn.) - which have undoubtedly concentrated researches too unilaterally on societies of specific regions, such as the Mediterranean area or Latin America. This has created an artificial divide and a fictitious boundary between they, those who can organise themselves only through the practice of patronage (thus implying corrupt), and we, who know more virtuous forms of organisation (thus more highly developed and civilised). On the other hand, we can reasonably wonder why anthropologists, instead of merely mentioning a vague critique to the implicit ethnocentrism of many studies on European peripheries, have not broadened the field of this type of research to the societies they come from, meaning the ones of reflexive modernity. But then they would have unveiled an inappropriate reality because through network analysis they might have discovered that patronage, highly personalised coalitions, and factionalism are quite widespread and definitely not unheard-of phenomena even in Switzerland, Holland, Germany, or Sweden. In my opinion, this is one of the great missed opportunities of our discipline. The terminological change is the second indication. At the very same above-mentioned time, self reflexive analysis imposed, rightly or not, a zealous critical revision of many
