Per Hage - Böcker

In their previous book, Structural Models in Anthropology, anthropologist Per Hage and mathematician Frank Harary used graph theory, a branch of pure mathematics, to develop a family of models for the study of social, symbolic, and cognitive relations.In this book the authors extend these models and apply them to the analysis of exchange structures in Oceania, presenting graph theory in a form accessible to the non-mathematical reader. Using ethnographic data from Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, they demonstrate that the language, techniques, and theorems of graph theory provide the essential basis for the description, quantification, simulation, enumeration, and notation of the great variety of exchange forms actually found in Oceanic societies.

Contrary to common perception and belief, most island societies of the Pacific were not isolated, but were connected to other island societies by relations of kinship and marriage, trade and tribute, language and history. Using network models from graph theory, the authors analyse the formation of island empires, the social basis of dialect groups, the emergence of economic and political centres, the evolution and devolution of social stratification and the evolution of kinship terminologies, marriage systems and descent groups from common historical prototypes. The book is at once a unique and important contribution to Oceania studies, anthropology and social network analysis.

Hage and Harary present a comprehensive introduction to the use of graph theory in social and cultural anthropology. Using a wide range of empirical examples, the authors illustrate how graph theory can provide a language for expressing in a more exact fashion concepts and notions that can only be imperfectly rendered verbally. They show how graphs, digraphs and networks, together with their associated matrices and duality laws, facilitate the study of such diverse topics as mediation and power in exchange systems, reachability in social networks, efficiency in cognitive schemata, logic in kinship relations, and productivity in subsistence modes. The interaction between graphs and groups provides further means for the analysis of transformations in myths and permutations in symbolic systems. The totality of these structural models aids in the collection as well as the interpretation of field data. The presentation is clear, precise and readily accessible to the nonmathematical reader. It emphasizes the implicit presence of graph theory in much of anthropological thinking.