This book offers an orientation to current anthropological research on kinship and exchange in a social network perspective. It contains case studies and formal approaches of substantive interest to social and economic anthropologists, sociologists, and historians concerned with marriage, descent, and the exchange of material and symbolic resources. For social networkers and methodologists the application of formal models and the social network approach to ethnographic case studies should be revealing, and a number of significant extensions to network methods and formal theory are introduced. Diverse cases and theoretical approaches are integrated into sections and explained in section introductions. The book can be used in classes on social organization, social networks, social stratification, economy and social change, in any of several social science disciplines.

This work is an outcome of a cooperative research program on the comparative study of social organization that we launched some years ago. We would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for funding Douglas R. White's first stay at Cologne under a senior scientist's award in 1990 and since then for enabling the continual exchange among the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, and the Institute of Ethnology, University of Cologne, under its Transcoop Scheme for Transatlantic Scientific Exchange. Likewise the National Science Foundation grant for “Network Analysis of Kinship, Social Transmission and Exchange” provided the necessary matching fund for which we are grateful. The German Research Society supported a conference on kinship and exchange in 1993 at which preliminary drafts of the chapters in this volume were presented.