Kinship, Networks, and Exchange

This collection of original articles aims at revitalising the study of kinship and exchange in a social network perspective. It brings together studies of empirical systems of marriage and descent with investigations of the flow of material resources in societies of Africa, Asia, the Pacific and Europe. Restudies of classic ethnographic cases and fieldwork studies of kinship and exchange demonstrate how the social and material aspects of society are related, and address issues of concern to anthropology and the neighbouring disciplines of history, sociology and economics. This book marks the emergence of a new era in the study of kinship and exchange using a productive combination of ethnographic substance with formal methods, one which leaves behind older structural-functionalist and culturalist assumptions.