Network Structure, Political Hierarchy, and Economic Inequality: An Interdisciplinary Workshop and Training Program

Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe NM

Investigators

Abstract

This award supports a workshop to be co-organized by Dr. Samuel Bowles and Dr. Paul Hooper and to be held at the Santa Fe Institute. The workshop will bring together leading contributors to the theoretical literature on social networks with anthropologists and other field researchers using network techniques to study the social structure of small-scale societies. The objectives are: (a) to enrich network theory by deploying it in a large set of data in an attempt to answer central social science questions of political hierarchy and economic inequality; (b) to enhance the theoretical, statistical and computational capacity of field workers in the quantitative study of networks; and (c) to provide the basis of one or more synthetic comparative papers, as well as papers on the individual populations involved.