Genealogical Method
The genealogical method is W. H. R. Rivers' systematic procedure for collecting kinship genealogies in the field using a small, fixed set of questions and the community's own kin terms. By asking each informant a standard sequence — who are your parents, your siblings, your spouse, your children, and so on — and recording named individuals together with the relationship terms applied to them, the ethnographer accumulates concrete pedigrees. These pedigrees are then assembled to reconstruct descent, marriage, residence, and the broader principles of social organization.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Rivers, W. H. R. (1910). The genealogical method of anthropological inquiry. The Sociological Review, 3(1), 1–12. · DOI 10.1111/j.1467-954X.1910.tb02078.x
- Bernard, H. R. (2017). Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (6th ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. · ISBN 9780759112421
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.