The Research Group in Fundamental and Oriented Anthropology (GRAFO) aims to contribute to the construction of resilient communities by studying and improving the living conditions of economically or socially vulnerable and culturally diverse populations in an increasingly unequal and polarized digitalized global society.
GRAFO’s distinctive perspective focuses on relationships. While the Social Sciences generally adopt an individualistic approach to studying a population’s living conditions and their effects, this approach largely overlooks the complex interdependencies between individuals and how these may contribute to or offset vulnerabilities. GRAFO specifically focuses on these interdependencies—that is, on individuals’ immediate social environments. The strong and weak ties that individuals maintain with kin and non-kin provide informal social support (or social capital) and collaboration, diffuse information, exert social control, and shape identities and perceptions of society, but they can also be conflictive or lacking in solidarity. These relational dimensions affect individual outcomes and (dis)integrate communities. GRAFO is uniquely positioned to study these intermediate social structures and dynamics from a holistic and exploratory anthropological perspective, while also conducting personal network research using mixed methods and quantitative network science applied to these social structures. Examples of questions that GRAFO has addressed in the past and has begun to address include:
- Do personal relationships support individuals in poor households or increase their marginalization under conditions of poverty? Why?
- How do family ties function under conditions of poverty?
- How can people experiencing homelessness maintain functional social relationships that provide social support?
- Can charitable organizations complement the functions usually carried out by informal networks of individual support?
- What kind of care do informal support networks provide to adoptive parents?
- How do migrants become more socially integrated into their host societies over time?
- Do institutions influence the emergence of transnational social fields woven through the relationships that migrants maintain and create between countries of origin and residence, and how do these fields affect migrants’ lives?
- What kind of social capital can small and medium-sized social enterprises rely on?
As these questions illustrate, the social network perspective is far from being merely a methodological tool; it constitutes a rich substantive field of research on human relationships. GRAFO is internationally recognized for its expertise in this area. It provides training on personal networks through its biennial summer school and plays key roles in international professional associations and in the editorial boards of leading journals in the field.