Revisiting the culture–social structure duality debate through the lens of personal networks

In this article, we address a long-standing debate in social science about whether culture or social structure provides the best lens for understanding human behavior and how that scales to the level of social institutions. We argue that the notion of personal networks offers new insights into this culture–social structure dualism. We demonstrate this by examining early human systems based on kinship and complex systems pointing to the research of anthropologists working in southern Africa who created the concept of personal networks as a necessary tool to understand newly emerging social systems under British colonial rule.