Mapping Cultural Diversity through Personal Networks (MapCDPerNets)
Simultaneously considering culture and social structure has proven a very difficult task, as they require different methodological approaches (e.g., analyzing qualities and attributes versus formal analysis of roles and positions). Mary Douglas and other researchers proposed one of the few attempts to reconcile both dimensions of human societies – structure and culture – with their Grid/Group theory. Building on this idea, Molina et al. (2022) demonstrated that it was possible to predict cultural traits such as country of origin and religion (instances of the «grid» dimension) by examining the structural characteristics of personal networks of migrants in the USA and Spain (the «group» dimension). The structural measures of personal networks, considered as samples of the social structures in which individuals are embedded, revealed a «cultural signature» indicating the existence of an underlying sociocultural continuum that has not been well understood until now. This promising but preliminary result leads us to propose this project, that tackles the challenge of conceptualizing cultural diversity worldwide from a structural perspective, bridging the gap between culture and structure and seeking a new overarching concept.
Principal investigators:
Angel Sánchez
(Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain)
José Luis Molina
(Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Christopher McCarty
(University of Florida, USA)