Australian Kinship

Kinship Expressions and Terms

All languages have expressions that can be glossed ‘father,’ ‘wife,’ ‘brother-in-law,’ etc., covering consanguineal, spousal, and affinal categories. However, from the beginning of serious cross-cultural study, it has been apparent that societies differ in the kinship categories used. To facilitate comparison, an ‘etic grid’ is necessary; namely, an open-ended universe of kin-types, such as ‘fa...

Kinship, Class, and Community

This review presents studies in various world regions. Each uses network analysis software designed explicitly for kinship studies with explicit network measures of cohesion. It presents evidence of fundamental differences in the forms of marital cohesion that show profoundly variable effects over a wide range of social phenomena, regional scales, and diverse cultures. Social cohesion is the ba...

What Is Kinship?

African Family and Kinship

Shortest Kinship Description Problem∗

We consider a problem in descriptive kinship systems, namely finding the shortest sequence of terms that describes the kinship between a person and their relatives. The problem reduces to finding the minimum weight path in a labeled graph where the label of the path comes from a regular language. The running time of the algorithm is O(n3 + s), where n and s is the input size and the output size...