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...

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...

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...

26/2/224. Dumont, L. ([1953] 1975) ‘Le vocabulaire de parenté dravidien comme expression du mariage’, in Dravidien et Kariera, l’alliance de mariage dans l’Inde du Sud et en Australie. Paris/La Haye: Mouton. pp. 85–100 and 145–46. Gabail, L. and Kyburz, O. (2008) ‘Hurons chez les Touregs’, Annales de Démographie Historique, 116:197–232. Grange, C. and Houseman, M. (2008) ‘Objets d’analyse pour ...

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In the half-century following the end of World War II, the social environment surrounding the Japanese family has changed greatly. In particular, environmental changes including the interrelationship between the legal system, industrial structure and demographic factors have had a major impact on the structure and function of the family. Further, it has been said that since the 1960s, the Japan...

Like many African rural-to-urban migrants, Igbo-speaking migrants to cities in Nigeria maintain close ties to their places of origin. 'Home people' constitute a vital core of most migrants' social networks. The institution of kinship enables migrants to negotiate Nigeria's clientelistic political economy. In this context, dichotomous distinctions between rural and urban can be inappropriate ana...

Using the kin altruism framework (Hamilton, 1964), this paper models descendant family firms. Kin altruism makes relatives soft monitors, leading to a “policing problem” within family firms. This policing problem results in both increased managerial diversion and increased monitoring expense at fixed compensation levels. When incentive constraints determine compensation, increasing kinship alwa...