Anthropology: Analyzing Large Kinship and Marriage Networks With Pgraph and Pajek

Five key prob lems of kin ship net works are bound ed ness, cohe sion, size and cohe sive relink ing, types of rela tions and relink ing, and groups or roles. Approaches to solv ing these prob lems include for mats avail able for elec tronic stor age of genea logi cal data and rep re sen ta tions of gene alo gies using graphs. P-graphs rep re sent cou ples and uncou pled chil dren as ver ti ces, whereas parentchild links are the arcs con nect ing nodes both within and between dif fer ent nuclear fami lies. Using results from graph the ory, P-graphs are shown to lend them selves to solu tions of the prob lems dis cussed. Relink ing of fami lies through mar riage, for exam ple, can be for mally defined as sets of bounded groups that are the cohe sive cores of kin ship net works, with nodes at vari ous dis tances from such cores. The struc ture of such cores yields an ana lytic decom po si tion of kin ship net works and con stitu ent group and role rela tion ships. The Pgraph and Pajek pro grams for large net work analy sis help both to rep re sent kin ship net works and their pat terns and to solve prob lems of analy sis.