Professor of Anthropology (PhD: U of Minnesota, 1969)
4169 Social Sciences Plaza A
(949) 824-7602
email: drwhite at uci dot edu
Doug White is a Keynote speaker at the European Conference on Complex Systems Paris, 14-18 November 2005, title: Networks, Hierarchy and Complexity see http://complexsystems.lri.fr/ see link for "Invited Speakers".
Douglas White was Awarded Outstanding Article Publication from the ASA Mathematical Sociology Section, 2004. With James Moody, "Social Cohesion and Embeddedness: A Hierarchical Concept of Social Groups. American Sociological Review 68(1):1-25.
Professor White has been awarded sixteen National Science Foundation research grants as PI or co-PI, the latest for his research on Longitudinal Network Studies and Predictive Social Cohesion Theory. This grant supports collaborative faculty and graduate student research on eight long-term field sites and eight historical case studies over two years. Visit the website for Anthropological Computing and Related Sciences .
His Turkish nomad longitudinal study is written up in Chronicling Cultures: Long-term Field Research in Anthropology, eds., Robert V. Kemper and Anya Royce (2002 AltaMira Press). In 1990 he was awarded the prestigious Alexander von Humboldt Distinguished Senior U.S. Scientist Research Award and the Bourse de Haute Niveau of the Ministre de la Recherche et de la Technologie, Paris, which combined to fund several years of research in Europe; he has been a visiting Directeur des tudes at the cole des Hautes tudes en Sciences Sociales since 1999, and is now a member of a European Union research team which will study Society as a Complex System over the next five years. He belongs to three working groups at the Santa Fe Institute for complexity studies: Co-Evolution of Markets and States (modeling Florence, Italy 1200-1500 and the Biotech Industry 1988-2002), Conceptualization of Human Environmental Dynamics (modeling European socio-environmental dynamics), and Network Dynamics (Guest editing a special issue of the SFI journal Complexity dedicated to Networks and Complexity). In 2001 he gave the plenary address on Social Structure and Process in the Field of Biotechnology: Network Dynamics to the Swiss Sociological Association.
He has authored 75 refereed articles, and co-edited three books, the latest with Cambridge University Press and co-editor Thomas Schweizer, Kinship, Networks and Exchange (1998). His newest book, Network Analysis and Ethnographic Problems: Process Models of a Turkish Nomad Clan, with Ulla Johanson, has appeared with Lexington. He is past president of the Social Science Computing Association, listed in Who's Who in America (1995-) and the International Who's Who (2000-). Early in his career he was co-Director of a multi-million dollar anthropological research project on the Irish Language, co-Director of the Cumulative Cross-Cultural Coding Center in which he and G.P. Murdock established the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample that has grown exponentially over the years to include 85 independent studies contributing over 1800 variables to a database on 186 world societies. This database is used worldwide in anthropology classes as a teaching laboratory, and White has pioneered in the development of computer-based anthropology teaching methods and curricula.
Many of Prof. White's recent articles and details about the books are available on-line at http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/abstracts98.html.