From quantitative to qualitative and back again. The interplay between structure and culture and the analysis of networks in pre-modern societies By Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

https://www.academia.edu/4940922/From_quantitative_to_qualitative_and_back_again_The_interplay_between_structure_and_culture_and_the_analysis_of_networks_in_pre_modern_societies?rhid=37159219427&swp=rr-rw-wc-145687825&nav_from=a49ba18b-7767-418d-9e47-6ad35b176969 “Most cultural theorists saw network analysis as located squarely in the positivist camp, reducing cultural richness to 1s and 0s and lacking attention to processes of interpretation and meaning-construction.”; thus Ann Mische in 2011 summed up attitudes towards network analysis which are still strong also in many circles of historical studies. Of course, these verdicts were not entirely unfounded, as Mustafa Emirbayer and Jeff Goodwin pointed out in 1994 in their influential paper on „Network Analysis, Culture, and the Problem of Agency“: “despite its powerful conceptualization of social structure, network analysis as it has been developed to date has inadequately theorized the causal role of ideals, beliefs, and values, and of the actors that strive to realize them; as a result, it has neglected the cultural and symbolic moment in the very determination of social action.” Although meanwhile various theoretical concepts and models of “relational sociology” have been developed , the cultural dimension is still underrepresented in many works of quantitatively oriented social and also historical network analysis. In this paper, I will present the explanatory value of some of these relational approaches to social reality for historical research and their combination with quantitative network analysis. For various case studies, the actual interplay between the structural and the cultural dimension of social, religious, economic, political or intellectual linkages between individuals, groups, communities, but also cultural concepts will be demonstrated. ...