Kinship Network Analysis

Kinship network analysis treats genealogies as graphs and applies network methods to study how marriage and descent structure a society. Pioneered by Douglas White and Paul Jorion's 1992 P-graph approach, it shifts the unit of analysis from the individual ego-centered family tree to the whole web of couples and parent-child links, making it possible to detect marriage rules, alliance patterns, and the circulation of people between groups that conventional kinship diagrams obscure.