In 1991 the Somali state collapsed. Once heralded as the only true nation-state in Africa, the Somalia of the 1990s suffered brutal internecine warfare. At the same time a politically created famine caused the deaths of a half a million people and the flight of a million refugees. During the civil war, scholarly and popular analyses explained Somalia's disintegration as the result of ancestral hatreds played out in warfare between various clans and subclans. In Unraveling Somalia, Catherine Besteman challenges this view and argues that the actual pattern of violence—inflicted disproportionately on rural southerners—contradicts the prevailing model of ethnic homogeneity and clan opposition. She contends that the dissolution of the Somali nation-state can be understood only by recognizing that over the past century and a half there emerged in Somalia a social order based on principles other than simple clan organization—a social order deeply stratified on the basis of race, status, class, region, and language.

At the conclusion of the twentieth century, the US economy was booming, but the gap between the rich and poor widened significantly in the 1990s, poverty rates among women and children skyrocketed, and there was an unprecedented rise in familial homelessness. Based on a four-year ethnographic study, Anne R. Roschelle examines how socially structured race, class, and gender inequality contributed to the rise in family homelessness and the devastating consequences for parents and their children. Struggling in the Land of Plenty analyzes the appalling conditions under which homeless women and children live, the violence endemic to their lives, the role of the welfare state in perpetrating poverty, and their never-ending struggle for survival.

This collection of articles aims at revitalizing the study of kinship and exchange in a social network perspective. It brings together studies of empirical systems of marriage and descent with investigations of the flow of material resources in societies of Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe. Restudies of classic ethnographic cases and fieldwork studies of kinship and exchange demonstrate how the social and material aspects of society are related, and address issues of concern to anthropology and the neighbouring disciplines of history, sociology and economics. This book marks the emergence of an era in the study of kinship and exchange using a productive combination of ethnographic substance with formal methods, one which leaves behind older structural-functionalist and culturalist assumptions.

The intent of this collection of original essays is to revitalize the study of kinship and exchange in a social network perspective. The collection combines studies of empirical systems of marriage and descent with investigations of the flow of material resources. This book marks the emergence of a new era in the study of kinship and exchange using a productive combination of ethnographic substance with formal methods, one which leaves behind older structural-functionalist and culturalist assumptions.

Human beings are embedded in a set of social relations. A social network is one way of conceiving that set of relations in terms of a number of persons connected to one another by varying degrees of relatedness. In the early Jesus group documents featuring Paul and coworkers, it takes little effort to envision the apostle's collection of friends and friends of friends that is the Pauline network. The persons who constituted that network are the focus of this set of brief books. For Christians of the Western tradition, these persons are significant ancestors in faith. While each of them is worth knowing by themselves, it is largely because of their standing within that web of social relations woven about and around Paul that they are of lasting interest. Through this series we hope to come to know those persons in ways befitting their first-century Mediterranean culture. Epaphras belonged to Paul's network of friends. Because Epaphras is mentioned only three times in the Second Testament, in the letters to Philemon and the Colossians, it is unsurprising that he is passed over by biblical scholars more interested in Paul's better-known companions. Michael Trainor points out, however, that even though Epaphras is mentioned infrequently, Colossians portrays him as an authentic interpreter of Paul and an important teacher. After all, by the time the letter to the Colossians was written, Paul was dead. Epaphras ensures for that community and the next generation of Christians the continuity, as well as the freshness and vitality, of Paul's teaching. Thus Epaphras has great relevance for Christians today who seek ways to engage the contemporary world in light of their discipleship.

While some social scientists may argue that we have always been networked, the increased visibility of networks today across economic, political, and social domains can hardly be disputed. Social networks fundamentally shape our lives and social network analysis has become a vibrant, interdisciplinary field of research. In The Oxford Handbook of Social Networks, Ryan Light and James Moody have gathered forty leading scholars in sociology, archaeology, economics, statistics, and information science, among others, to provide an overview of the theory, methods, and contributions in the field of social networks. Each of the thirty-three chapters in this Handbook moves through the basics of social network analysis aimed at those seeking an introduction to advanced and novel approaches to modeling social networks statistically. They cover both a succinct background to, and future directions for, distinctive approaches to analyzing social networks. The first section of the volume consists of theoretical and methodological approaches to social networks, such as visualization and network analysis, statistical approaches to networks, and network dynamics. Chapters in the second section outline how network perspectives have contributed substantively across numerous fields, including public health, political analysis, and organizational studies. Despite the rapid spread of interest in social network analysis, few volumes capture the state-of-the-art theory, methods, and substantive contributions featured in this volume. This Handbook therefore offers a valuable resource for graduate students and faculty new to networks looking to learn new approaches, scholars interested in an overview of the field, and network analysts looking to expand their skills or substantive areas of research.