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 basis of mutuality, cooperation, and well-being in human societies (Council of Europe, 2009). It includes the modes by which people are assimilated into societies, how groups hold power, stratify social relations, and manage the flow of resources. Kinship networks embedded in the civil societies of nation-states, in contrast to smallerscale societies, are far too rarely studied as a basis of social cohesion. Networks, the social tissues of our lives, are only partially visible to us; thus we fail to see how these are wrapped and embedded in larger networks. Thus the importance, as emphasized here, of an explicit science of social network analysis for kinship studies both at local and larger scales. The analyses of cohesive subsets show how kinship networks involve constructions of social class, ethnicity, migration, inheritance, social movements, and other largeas well as small-scale social phenomena. A kinship network is composed of relations of parentage (parent-child arcs, oriented by time) and couples (e.g., marriage). The nodes in an Ore-graph (Ore, 1960) are individuals, or, in a P-graph (White and Jorion, 1992), couples and individuals. The latter embeds the matrimonial or parental couple relation within the appropriate nodes: a person from a family of orientation parental-node joins one or more partners to form their own parental-couple node(s) (families of procreation). This makes it easy to trace matrimonial circuits, where one or more couples have common ancestors (see Hamberger et al., 2011: Chapter 35) so the last in their series of marriages (ordered in time), or a single marriage, relinks the families that were already linked. It is these relinking circuits that create kinship cohesion through marriage. Ore-graphs have to separate the cohesiveness of parent-child 3-cliques (motherfather-child) from the broader of cohesiveness of shared ancestries, which is directly captured by P-graph circuitry. To reconcile these differences, Harary and White (2001) defined a P-system as a parental (kinship) network that orders the inclusion relations, at multiple levels of embedding, of individuals, marriage, nuclear family, descent lines, and cohesive groups. People are in one or more family, one or more marriage, and embedded in groups of higher levels of organization. The higher-order analyses of kinship networks offer integrative perspectives that are more veridical as to how individuals and communities are connected, one that also takes into account how different kinds of groups are embedded in one another. New ways of imaging and analyzing kinship networks as objects in their own right, with tens to millions of people, make it possible to see social phenomena in ways that open a new series of sociological and anthropological questions.