Anthropology

Abstract

Five key problems of kinship networks are boundedness, cohesion, size and cohesive relinking, types of relations and relinking, and groups or roles. Approaches to solving these problems include formats available for electronic storage of genealogical data and representations of genealogies using graphs. P-graphs represent couples and uncoupled children as vertices, whereas parent-child links are the arcs connecting nodes both within and between different nuclear families. Using results from graph theory, P-graphs are shown to lend themselves to solutions of the problems discussed. Relinking of families through marriage, for example, can be formally defined as sets of bounded groups that are the cohesive cores of kinship networks, with nodes at various distances from such cores. The structure of such cores yields an analytic decomposition of kinship networks and constituent group and role relationships. The Pgraph and Pajek programs for large network analysis help both to represent kinship networks and their patterns and to solve problems of analysis.