New System for the Formal Analysis of Kinship

A New System for the Formal Analysis of Kinship offers an easy-to-use method for representing and analyzing kinship in the study of societies. Mathematically rigorous and empirically insightful, the notation is based on "father" and "mother" relations and their reciprocals, "fatherlings" and "motherlings"--i.e., the children of either the father or mother. All other kinsfolk are represented by concatenations or strings of these in structural categories that present consistent relative product relations among terminological categories. This formal system, applied to 57 different kin-terminological systems in the book, will be of value to students and scholars in anthropology, genealogy, and other social sciences.