Kinship used to be described as what anthropologists do. Today, many might well say that it is what anthropologists do not do. One possible explanation is that the notion of kinship fell off anthropology’s radar due to the criticisms raised by Needham and Schneider among others, which supposedly demonstrated that kinship is not a sound theoretical concept. Drawing inspiration from epidemiologic...

Kinship plays a fundamental role in human communities as a basic principle for organizing individuals into social groups. Representing kinship relationships in a formal and precise way is then a crucial task when modelling many knowledge domains, and it may constitute a relevant benchmark for the reasoning layer of the Semantic Web. In this paper we face the problem of representing some basic a...

Most languages have some expressions to refer to family members (e.g., those referring to ‘father,’ ‘brother,’ ‘uncle,’ etc.). In this paper, we will provide an analysis of Japanese and Chinese kinship terms, under a framework whose representational system has an ontological nature. It will be shown that this framework is effective not only in figuring out similarities and differences among the...

Self-resemblance has been found to have a context-dependent effect when expressing preferences for faces. Whereas dissimilarity preference during mate choice in animals is often explained as an evolutionary adaptation to increase heterozygosity of offspring, self-resemblance can be also favored in humans, reflecting, e.g., preference for kinship cues. We performed two studies, using transformat...

The concept of kinship has been central to investigating the remarkably varied social structures of primates . Genealogical relationships between individuals are predicted, from the first principles of evolutionary theory, to be critical influences on the nature of social relationships . Sociobiological/socioecological theory in particular predicts that kinship should have primary importance fo...

OBJECTIVES Marriages among kin have the dual effect of both increasing average group relatedness as well as reducing the total number of kin by eliminating more genealogically and geographically distant individuals from kinship networks. Marriage decisions therefore face a tradeoff between density of kin, or formation of intensive kinship systems, and the diversity of kin, or extensive kinship ...

This overview of the development of the multilevel network approach to kinship has at its core the definition of a multilevel network as one in which a node at one level may contain a network of relations at the next level (Harary and Batell 1981). The definition is potentially recursive so as to define a particular kind of system, a network with potentially many levels. André Weil (1949), for ...