Family background-kinship-can propagate careers. The evidence for academic nepotism is littered with complex associations and disputed causal inferences. Surname clustering, albeit with very careful consideration of surnames' flows across regions and time periods, can be used to reflect family ties. We examined surname patterns in the health science literature, by country, across five decades. ...

Kinship verification from facial images is an interesting and challenging problem. The current algorithms on this topic typically represent faces with multiple low-level features, followed by a shallow learning model. However, these general manual features cannot well discover information implied in facial images for kinship verification, and thus even current best algorithms are not satisfying...

Social norms that regulate reproductive and marital decisions generate impressive cross-cultural variation in the prevalence of kin marriages. In some societies, marriages among kin are the norm and this inbreeding creates intensive kinship networks concentrated within communities. In others, especially forager societies, most marriages are between more genealogically and geographically distant...

Earlier studies in kinship networks have primarily focused on observing the social relationships existing between family relatives. In this study, we pre-identified hubs in the network to investigate if they could play a catalyst role in the transfer of physical information. We conducted a case study of a ceremony performed in one of the families of a small Hindu community – the Uttar Rarhi Kay...

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...

We examine data on and models of small world properties and parameters of social networks. Our focus, on tie-strength, multilevel networks and searchability in strong-tie social networks, allows us to extend some of the questions and findings of recent research and the fit of small world models to sociological and anthropological data on human communities. We offer a ‘navigability of strong tie...

OBJECTIVES The purpose here is to identify those processes that account for the more active and supportive kinship networks among Black oldest old than found among their White age peers. METHODS Focused interviews were conducted with 122 Blacks 85 years and older. Both open-ended and semistructured questions were asked in order to determine how Blacks defined family and kinship membership, th...

conceptions of anthropology and ethnography are interlinked. Here I examine cognition and social networks in relation to the concept of culture, exemplified in the study of kinship. Concepts used in network analysis of the context and behaviors involved in kinship lead to new understandings of patterns of cohesion. Within cohesive groups, people in various communities are shown to use the netwo...