A major integrating interest has been in how various social network approaches and methods can be used to develop new insights into social cohesion. We have conducted a literature review to examine the use of networks in social network analysis and social anthropology in order to highlight enduring problems and difficulties of network thinking, as well as its potential. We show that despite the methodological virtuosity of social network analysis and its genuine potential to operationalise network ideas, it paradoxically operates as a bounded community rather than as a network, and that one implication is that it does not unravel significant differences in approach amongst its own ranks.