All of these analyses raise the question of the inclusion of networks in society: do networks reproduce inequalities, do they possibly reinforce them, or do they still offer small spaces for "play" among social constraints and divisions? Do they constitute for the social sciences an intermediate level of observation, or a relatively autonomous dimension of social life, bearing its own logic and its own dynamics? We have tried here to shed light on some of these dynamics, as part of the implementation of the principles of a relational sociology.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the Internet was starting to become fairly widely used in academic circles. This development raised questions within the community of social science researchers who were studying social networks. Among them was of course that of the changes in relational flows and structures (connectivity, size, density, and composition of personal networks, etc.) that might occur as a result of the increasing diversification and sophistication of communication technologies. For this chapter, we draw on two recent original surveys in addition to the two on which our analyses have so far been based. The first is a questionnaire-based survey conducted in January and February 2014 among 2,700 young people aged between 15 and 25 living in the Toulouse area. The second survey is a detailed questionnaire filled in during face-to-face interviews by some 470 individuals aged 60 and over (the oldest was 100 at the time of the survey) in the Toulouse area. The changes seem to be tending in the direction of a slight reduction in strong ties, an increase in weak or even very weak ties and a strengthening of relational inequalities and homophily.

If relationships can be resources, how are they distributed? Are there "relational inequalities" as there are income inequalities? Like in other areas of social life, in relational matters not everyone is in the same boat. The environment in which one was brought up, the studies one followed, the profession one practices, life events and, of course, personal choices shape for each person a network that bears the traces of these experiences. There are large and small networks, family-centered networks, and others that are much more open, as well as dense and less dense networks. Some are made up of executives and wealthy people, others are made up of less fortunate people. Some span a large "social surface," reaching out to diverse backgrounds, others are concentrated in a very small world. Results that highlight relational inequalities are presented, followed by a discussion on the processes that produce and amplify them.

While regional comparison’s methodological relevance is diminishing, its significance for historical anthropology may increase if properly assessed and reconfigured. This chapter argues this point by discussing three examples from historical South Arabia. These cases highlight the significance of adequately reflecting and identifying existing notions of the “regional” in any given research context as the basic frame of reference in this version of comparison. As a crucial device from science studies and critical theory, the distinction between contexts of discovery, of justification, and of application may be useful for a reliable yet open and flexible conceptualization that includes self-reflexive as well as indigenous notions of the regional. It is also suggested that regional comparison can be improved by triangulating it with other methodological devices, ranging from network analysis to medium-range insights from general anthropology. In turn, this may advance the operational usefulness of regional comparison in historical anthropology by strengthening its potential for highlighting both regional commonalities and diversities among the phenomena under scrutiny.

This chapter argues that critical-comparative studies of two cases can offer context-sensitive and more valid accounts of social problems that accompany intensified global flows in an era of advanced capitalism. This chapter presents a critical-comparative analysis of well-documented suicide epidemics in Chuuk and Samoa. The analysis proceeds in three steps. The analysis begins with an incommensurate mode of comparison of ethnopsychologies of emotion and the management of anger as these contrast with dominant understandings in Western academic psy-disciplines. Second, the analysis compares the organization of everyday social and material reproduction in each site. This analysis provides insight into the local political-economic and social organizational processes that create social-structural disparities in terms of the vulnerabilities associated with self-harm as a strategy of the management of emotions and social-relational protest. The final step examines how each case is nested within wider political-economic and material processes and flows, creating differential sites of collective vulnerability to epidemic suicide at particular historical junctures.

Comparison in anthropology often entails a hermeneutic confrontation between two systems of thought. Starting from an implicit grounding in a home culture, the anthropologist “encounters” a different culture, tries to understand it in its own terms, and then uses those terms to critique home-style thinking. Rather than compare differences, this chapter compares two things understood to be “the same.” I begin with a comparison of two jazz renditions of the song, “Tangerine.” Comparing an amateurish version to a classic recording taught me more about the song’s structure than either version could have done alone. Using this example of a “better-worse” comparison, I turn to anthropologist Dorothy Lee, who wrote a series of essays contrasting what she saw as a “good” individualism, that of American Indian peoples, to the “bad” individualism of the contemporary United States. In Lee’s work, it was not a nonindividualist social formation that became the comparative touchstone for rethinking US culture as in de Tocqueville’s hierarchical-egalitarian contrast. Instead, Native American ways of living provided a model truer to the spirit of an ideal individualism than that celebrated in the United States.

In this chapter, the authors trace out the “natural history” of an intensely collaborative multisited comparison, which was distinct from many other comparative research projects because research at each site was carried out by a PhD-level anthropologist who was involved in the scientific development of the project rather than only in the implementation of a centrally directed project. It draws on their experiences with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, a large, US National Institutes of Health–funded multisite project, to discuss ways in which that comparative research could have been even more powerful, things that future comparative research should strive to avoid, recommended best practices, and what the authors would call “minimum adequate” approaches to comparative ethnography.

This chapter reflects on the methodological problems within a collaborative research project involving anthropology and developmental psychology. The project studied relations between child-rearing goals, emotionally arousing child-rearing practices, and the socialization and ontogenetic development of emotions in three different contexts (Indonesia, Madagascar, and Taiwan). I first discuss which demands were linked with the theoretical perspectives and methodological standards of the two disciplines. I then reflect on the problems encountered when trying to apply the same methods in all three contexts. One of the challenges for this interdisciplinary project was the differing kinds of empirical data gathered because of the need to adapt methods to local conditions. We needed a productive way to work between the methodological priorities of each discipline. Therefore, I designed a methodology that acknowledges the unique methodological advantages of anthropology – long-term field research, participant observation, using an explorative approach – while simultaneously making it possible to achieve theoretical and methodological equivalence in controlled cross-cultural comparisons.