Harrison C. White’s Sociolinguistic Investigations: From Polymer Physics to Netdom Emergence via Indexical Language

Harrison C. White, a founding giant of the relational turn in American sociology, has produced some of the most influential tools in social network analysis, including vacancy chains, structural equivalence, and blockmodels. Moreover, he has left us a monumental theoretical model of social emergence based on the creative interplay of three axiomatic primitives (identity, control, and switching) and two principles (self-similarity and dispersion). In the 1990s, White recognized the limitations of formal network analysis in capturing social actors’ phenomenological switches across complex network shapes and temporalities. So he adopted the constitutive and reflexive capacities of language, more specifically Peircean indexicality, to theorize cultural meaning and context-making in networks. Language matters to networks because through reflexive switches of indexical markers (e.g., switching forms of address and informal vs standard registers), actors renegotiate and reshape, often unintentionally, their network topologies. In this essay honoring his extraordinary legacy, I focus on White’s sociolinguistic turn and our mutual collaboration on the indexical dimensions of language in networks, including metapragmatics, heteroglossia, and poetics. I then consider White’s influence on my ethnographic research via the metapragmatics of context-making and HIV risk-taking across sexual networks. I conclude that White got closer than anyone else to solving Nadel’s paradox. Attempts have been made to solve the paradox, but either context or mathematics gets lost in the process. White kept both in focus. In my view, it is because of White’s genius and original ideas that we can still, in the 21st century, believe in the scientific project of sociology.