All Explainers
27 so far, newest first
Browse by area: Kinship & Family Structures (13) · Models in Anthropology (7) · Network Analysis (3) · Cultural Evolution (3) · Methods & Tools (6) · Books & Teaching (4) · Science & Society (5)
Small worlds and six degrees: what the folders, the model and the emails showed
Milgram's folders, the Watts and Strogatz rewiring model worked by hand, the 2003 email study, and what six degrees does and does not mean for villages and kin.
Section systems, and how the Kariera and Aranda rules work
How four-section (Kariera) and eight-subsection (Aranda) systems work: marriage and descent rules worked by hand, abstract labels, and what the model leaves out.
Galton's problem, or why cultures are not independent data points
Why cultures are not independent data points: Galton's 1888 objection to Tylor, a worked toy example, and the main fixes from careful sampling to phylogenies.
What the evidence says about Dunbar's number
Where the 150 in Dunbar's number comes from, the arithmetic behind it, what network studies find, and why a 2021 reanalysis and Dunbar's reply disagree.
Cultural consensus analysis, explained with five informants
How cultural consensus analysis uses agreement among informants to estimate both what each person knows and the answer key, with a worked five-person example.
Agent-based models in anthropology: growing societies from simple rules
What an agent-based model is, a six-household sharing model to run by hand, the generative idea, Long House Valley and Bali, and how to read a model critically.
Teaching kinship with a spreadsheet, one row per person
Build a small genealogy in Excel or Google Sheets: one row per person, formulas that find grandparents, siblings and cousins, and a lookup that names relatives.
André Weil and the first algebra of kinship
How André Weil turned Australian marriage rules into permutations in 1949, with a four-class system worked by hand and the algebra of cousin marriage.
Transmission biases: the copying rules behind cultural change
How conformist, prestige and content biases steer what people copy, with the conformity recursion worked by hand and an honest look at the evidence.
Pedigree collapse: why no one has a billion ancestors
Why the doubling of ancestors cannot go on: pedigree collapse worked through with small numbers, the Spanish Habsburgs, and what Chang and Rohde found.
Cross and parallel cousins, and why the difference matters
Cross and parallel cousins explained: the linking-sibling test, why Iroquois and Dravidian terms split them, and what cross-cousin marriage does to alliances.
Network density and centrality, worked by hand
Density, degree, closeness and betweenness computed by hand for a seven-household network, and what each number can and cannot tell an anthropologist.