A proposal for the Sociology of the Family
series of Pine Forge Press.
Community and
Social Cohesion: Computing and Genealogical Analysis in the Age of Cyberspace
Douglas R. White, editor, with contributions
from Michael Houseman, Paul Jorion, Lilyan Brudner, Michael Schnegg, Vladimir
Batagelj, Andrej Mrvar and Frank Harary.
The last decade has
seen a reflorescence of the art: the study of community social structure,
beginning with the genealogical linkages amongst community members.
Genealogically based web sites have become one of the most popular
noncommerical sites on the web. The internet burgeons with computerized
genealogies organized by community, extended families, regions, and social
registers. Formats for exchange of data allow researchers to assemble and
integrate genealogical information from diverse sources. Commercial software
and freeware provide database entry, graphics and diagrams, and various forms
of structural and statistical analysis. Social network analysts turn to such
data -- and the data of ethnography and social history -- to explore the
structure of genealogical networks, the genealogical construction of community,
social class, and various types of elites.
The recording and
tracing genealogical linkages is one of the oldest human arts, going back well
before the time of the Ancient Egyptians. Recognition of genealogical linkages
is at the very core of the human experience. The thesis of this book is that
computer-based and network studies of community genealogies are altering our
concepts of social cohesion, social class, social structure and dynamics,
marriage systems and strategies, in fundamental ways.
The analysis of
community genealogies by computer has much to contribute to the humanities and
social sciences and to the understanding of human communities and social
histories. Newer concepts of cohesion, drawing on insights from anthropology,
emphasize the distributed properties of social networks rather than the more
limited concepts of proximity and centralized structure as the primary elements
of cohesion. The collection of articles chronicles the work of a team of
anthropological researchers and computer scientists in developing new methods
and applications for the analysis of community genealogies. The book answers a
need to respond to requests from students, social scientists and the public at
large for guidance in the new concepts, findings and methods of analysis. The
introduction reviews both the significance of the studies included in the
volume, and the freeware and commercial programs available for ethnographers,
historians and genealogists, both amateur and professional.
The next three
foundational chapters (Part I) develop a graph representation and analytic
framework that is specifically suited to the analysis of large genealogical and
social networks. Examples include Old Testament Patriarchs, American
Presidents, natives of interior Australia, and Indonesian villages.
Three elementary
applications (Part II) begin with a chapter on the Indonesian community
genealogies in which the analysis is rich with ethnographic detail and
implications for the study of culture and social stratification. The next
chapter surveys the concepts and genealogical data on dual organization among
Amazonian Indians. The final chapter uses the insights gained about the
genealogical network structure of dual organization generally to derive a new
understanding of the dual organization typical of the culture areas of
Dravidian South India and Sri Lanka, using data from a classical ethnographic
study of Sir Edmund Leach.
Software and
simulation methods for analysis of community genealogies are reviewed in the
two chapters of Part III. The first chronicles the shift from Pgraph, the
special purpose software used in the earlier articles, to Pajek, a more modern
and general purpose analytic system designed and implemented as freeware by
professional computer scientists for social network and genealogical analysis.
The second chapter provides methods for evaluating structural and statistical
studies of marriage systems by comparing results to those of computer
simulation in which demographic features of a case study are held constant, but
marriages are permuted to model what the society would look like with random
partner selection rather than any specific marriage preferences or strategies.
Comparisons to simulated models assess the relative contributions of
demographic constraints versus marriages rules and strategies to various
aspects of social structure and organization.
Using the newest
methods of analysis, two advanced applications to community genealogy
demonstrate in Part IV what can be learned from ethnographic and social
historical studies carried out on a large scale, where community members number
in the thousands, and the time span covers one or more centuries. These studies
were designed and carried out by authors White and Brudner using genealogical
interviews and archived historical records from manorial estates and parish
registers. The first study, of an Austrian village in Carinthia in which
farmsteads are passed relatively intact to single heirs, shows how a social
class of farmstead heirs is reconstituted in each generation by structural
endogamy, or matrimonial relinking among local families. The second study, of a
Mexican village in Tlaxcala, shows how regional social integration within a
single rural social class is achieved both by structural endogamy within the
local village and by a more wide ranging relinking of families through ritual
kinship via the compadre relationship between parents and godparents.
The concluding
section introduces a new conception of social cohesion that is appropriate for
community genealogy, and is consistent with the findings of our ethnographic
studies. A final chapter sums up what is learned through these studies of the
structure and dynamics of human communities using community genealogy as an
analytical scaffolding without which our understanding of human social
relationships is incomplete.
Except for a new
introduction and conclusion, all the articles in this proposed volume are
reprinted from refereed social science or simulation journals. The appendices
include an article on new concepts of structural analysis for community
genealogy published in the leading French anthropological journal, and manuals
for the Pgraph and Pajek computer programs in abbreviated form.
Contents
Introduction:
Community Genealogies (new)
I. Foundations
Chapter 1.
"Representing and Analyzing Kinship: A Network Approach" (Douglas R.
White & Paul Jorion) Current Anthropology 33:454-462. 1992.
Chapter 2.
"Kinship Networks and Discrete Structure Theory: Applications and
Implications" (Douglas R. White & Paul Jorion). Social Networks
18:267-314. 1996.
Chapter 3.
"Structural Endogamy and the Graphe de ParentÈ." (Douglas R. White).
Mathematiques, Informatique, et Sciences Humaines 137:107-125. 1997.
II. Elementary
Applications to Community Genealogy
Chapter 4.
"Kinship, Property and Stratification in Rural Java: A Network
Analysis" (Douglas R. White & Thomas Schweizer) pp. 36-58 in Kinship,
Networks and Exchange, eds. Thomas Schweizer and Douglas R. White. Cambridge
University Press. 1998.
Chapter 5.
"Taking Sides: Marriage Networks and Dravidian Kinship in Lowland South
America" (Michael Houseman & Douglas R. White) Transformations of
Kinship, pp. 214-243 in eds. Maurice Godelier, Thomas Trautmann and F.Tjon Sie
Fat, Smithsonian Institution Press. 1998.
Chapter 6.
"Network Mediation of Exchange Structures: Ambilateral Sidedness and
Property Flows in Pul Eliya" (Michael Houseman & Douglas R. White).
pp. 59-89 in Kinship, Networks and Exchange, eds. Thomas Schweizer and Douglas
R. White. Cambridge University Press. 1998.
III. Software and
Simulation
Chapter 7.
"Analyzing Large Kinship and Marriage Networks with Pgraph and Pajek"
(Douglas R. White, Vladimir Batagelj & Andrej Mrvar) Social Science
Computer Review 17(3):245-274. 1999.
Chapter 8.
"Elementary Simulation of Marriage Systems." (Douglas R. White).
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 2, no. 3. 2000.
http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/2/3/5.html
IV. Advanced
Applications to Community Genealogy
Chapter 9.
"Class, Property and Structural Endogamy: Visualizing Networked Histories"
(Lilyan A. Brudner & Douglas R. White). Theory and Society 25:161-208.
1997.
Chapter 10.
"Multiple Connectivities, its Boundaries and Integration: Kinship and
Compadrazgo in Rural Tlaxcala" (Douglas R. White, Michael Schnegg, Lilyan
Brudner & Hugo G. Nutini) Social Networks: Theory and Applications eds.
Jorge Gil and Samuel Schmidt. (In Press in Spanish) Mexico, D.F.: UNAM Press.
2000.
V. Conclusions
Chapter 11.
"Social Cohesion: Network Connectivity and Conditional Density"
(Frank Harary and Douglas R. White). 2000.
Chapter 12.
"What we have learned: Community Cohesion and Genealogical Analysis"
(new)
Appendices
"Structures
rÈticulaires de la pratique matrimoniale" (Michael Houseman & Douglas
R. White) L'Homme 139:59-85. 1996
Excerpts from
"ParentÈ Suite: User's Manual for Analysis of Kinship and Marriage
Networks" (Douglas R. White & Patricia Skyhorse), in V. Burton, T.
Finnigan, D. Herr, eds., Multimedia Renaissance in Social Science Computing.
CD-ROM. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Hard Copy: Wayfarer: Charting
Advances in Social Science Computing. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
"Pajek: A
Reference Guide" (Vladimir Batagelj & Andrej Mrvar). http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/pajekman.htm
CD Rom: All the
above, plus
"Pajek, the
Large Network Analysis Package"
(Vladimir Batagelj & Andrej Mrvar).
http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/pub/networks/pajek/.
GSview freeware (for printing
graphs). L. Peter Deutsch.Ý http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/aladdin/get600.html
Tool Kit for Structural Analysis of Genealogical Data and Kinship and Marriage Networks. Douglas R. White. http://eclectic.ss.uci.edu/~drwhite/pgraph/toolkit.html [accessible after Jan 31, 2001]