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What social ties are and how they operate depends on the cultural context constitutive of their meaning. Pursuing an explanatory account for the cultural embeddedness of social ties, we draw on Verstehende sociology and rely on in-depth insight into subjective perceptions developed by social network actors throughout their practice to represent symbolic and material contexts of social ties structurally. We put forward a new mixed data collection and processing approach that ethnographically maps interconnected three-layer socio-cultural networks of individuals, signs, and material objects. Opening cultural contexts to application of formal and statistical techniques, this approach allows for an 'interpretive explanation' of social ties. Illustrating the approach with our own longitudinal study of five European art groups, we discuss the peculiarities of three-layer socio-cultural data collection and processing, the new …