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i've been thinking about the different levels of social science research and how they parallel studying emergent systems. in anthropology, many studies are done through ethnography where the researcher literally goes somewhere, talks to the people there, looks around and writes about what they see. sociological studies, on the other hand, are often more statistical in nature and involve analyzing entire populations and social structures through looking at large data sets that include information from many different communities and places. although a society is made up of communities, the differences among communities make it so that only looking at one community at a time is insufficient to understand the whole system. at the same time, statistics for a whole population are often so abstracted and removed that they indicate little of what's actually happening on the ground.

The techniques available for researchers wishing to study small, local areas differ greatly from the less personal tactics used to study entire populations, and therefore people end up saying different kinds of things about what's going on in the system as a whole based on what level of activity they're looking at. anthropologists doing localized studies are more likely to talk about things like stories and images and culture, which are best studied by actually talking to and observing people. statistical analysis on the other hand lends itself more toward analyzing the overall shape of the economic and political system. so, even if we accept that complex structures emerge as the synthesis of smaller, simpler units, we still may find it useful to analyze such structures on different levels as different attributes of the system may be more evident on certain levels than on others.

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