To answer your question as to my interests, so far I find almost all of the literature of your field (albeit much of what I have read so far has consisted of your papers), mathematical anthropology and mathematical modeling of human society, to be interesting. With this fascination has come a desire to be a part of current research as soon as possible, and graduate school begins to seem a likely path.

In this spirit, could you suggest to me any papers and texts that contain either the knowledge which you expect your own graduate students to have or which you wish them to have when they first start their studies? Hopefully, after I have digested any such suggestions you may have and pried around in journals to perhaps better understand the current state of the field...

Here are some suggestions -

Anthropology

• (chapters of interest to you)
• Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, edited by H. Russell Bernard. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.
• Harris, Marvin. 2001. The Rise of Anthropological Theory : A History of Theories of Culture. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

• (any one of Hage and Harary)
• Hage, Per, and Frank Harary. 1983. Structural models in Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Hage, Per, and Frank Harary. 1991. Exchange in Oceania: A Graph Theoretic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Hage, Per, and Frank Harary. 1996. Island Networks. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (chapters of interest to you)
• Schweizer, Thomas, and Douglas R. White, Eds. 1998. Kinship, Networks and Exchange. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• EMCSR02papers

• Freeman, Linton C. 2000. Visualizing Social Networks. Journal of Social Structure 1:1-18. http://www.library.cmu.edu:7850/JoSS/ (chapters of interest to you)
• Degenne, Alain and Michel ForsČ. 1997. Introducing Social Networks. London: ISM. (chapters of interest to you)
• Frank Harary. 1969. Graph Theory. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.