Social contact networks are offered as a “language” for making social participation an aspect of social structure. An effort is made to set forth an orderly set of network characteristics—how they are formed and utilized and how they may be used for cross-cultural studies. To avoid the charge of merely offering a translation scheme into a new jargon a number of specific hypotheses are offered—hypotheses that are outgrowths of this particular “language.”The guiding thesis is that ego's social networks indicate the scope of his participation in his society. And, conversely, that existing social networks provide a clue to the strands which actually hold a society together.