Book notes

These notes are a reading guide for anyone who wants to go further than our explainers. The books are grouped by subject, starting with general introductions, and within each group the titles that assume less mathematics come first. Each note says what the book sets out to cover and who it is likely to suit. Every book recommended anywhere on the site, with a level label and the explainers that use it, is listed on the Reading shelf.

The notes draw on publishers' descriptions, tables of contents and each book's standing in the field. They are pointers, not reviews. For every book, the title, authors, year and publisher were checked against a publisher's page or a library catalogue. Where several editions exist, the line under the title gives the edition that was checked, and the note says which one it is. Some of the older titles are easier to find in a university library than in a bookshop.

First books

Kinship and Marriage: An Anthropological Perspective

Robin Fox · 1983 · Cambridge University Press

Fox's book first appeared from Penguin in 1967; Cambridge reissued it with a new preface in 1983 in its Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology series. The publisher presents it as the first attempt at an overview of kinship and alliance and points to two features: Fox's reconciliation of descent theory with alliance theory, and his deductive approach, which builds kinship systems up from a few universal premises. There is no formal mathematics, but the habit of deriving systems from rules is a good first step toward the algebraic books below. Its examples reflect the anthropology of the 1960s, so pair it with a recent textbook.

Kinship and Gender: An Introduction

Linda Stone and Diane E. King · 2025 · Routledge

The seventh edition of a long-running undergraduate textbook that ties the study of kinship to cross-cultural work on gender. According to the publisher, each chapter sets out key terms and general patterns, then shows how they play out through case studies drawn from societies described by earlier ethnographers and from contemporary communities. New material in this edition covers third gender, nonbinary and trans identities, spiritual kinship, genetic and ancestral ideas of relatedness, and new reproductive technologies. There is no mathematics here. It suits readers who want the social side of the systems that formal models simplify, and it sits well beside any of the structural books below.

Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas Across Cultures

Marcia Ascher · 2002 · Princeton University Press

Ascher, a professor of mathematics at Ithaca College, gathers mathematical ideas from small-scale and traditional cultures and treats them as mathematics in their own right. The publisher lists the themes: how societies structure time, reach decisions about the future, make models and maps, systematize relationships and create figures. Examples come from the Borana and the Malagasy, Tongans and Marshall Islanders, the Tamil, the Basques, and the Balinese and Kodi; Malagasy divination, for instance, rests on algebraic procedures. It suits readers who arrive from mathematics and want to see what anthropology adds, and teachers who need examples that go beyond kinship.

Kinship, structure and algebra

Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship

Thomas R. Trautmann · 1987 · University of California Press

An intellectual history of how kinship became a subject of study. Morgan was a Rochester, New York, lawyer and pioneer anthropologist, and his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family was one of the works that shaped modern anthropology. Trautmann offers a new account of how the idea of "kinship" took form in Morgan's work and of the part it played in late nineteenth-century thought. There is no mathematics. It suits students of the history of anthropology, and anyone who uses Morgan's contrast between "classificatory" and "descriptive" terminologies and wants to know where it came from.

Out-of-print copies on eBay^†: Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship

How Culture Makes Us Human: Primate Social Evolution and the Formation of Human Societies

Dwight W. Read · 2012 · Left Coast Press

A short book of 236 pages in the publisher's series Key Questions in Anthropology: Little Books on Big Ideas. Read, a UCLA anthropologist, asks what separates human societies from those of other primates. The publisher describes him weighing two positions: that human culture continues tendencies already present among primates, and that the human transition was so radical that primate models explain little about it. Read has also published formal analyses of kinship terminologies, which makes this a useful companion to the structural books in this section. It suits readers who want the large evolutionary question that sits behind the formal models.

Structural Models in Anthropology

Per Hage and Frank Harary · 1983 · Cambridge University Press

An anthropologist and a graph theorist wrote this introduction to graph theory for social and cultural anthropology, number 46 in the Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology series. Its case is that graphs, digraphs and networks give anthropologists a language for ideas that words express only imperfectly. The book's description runs through the applications: mediation and power in exchange systems, reachability in social networks, efficiency in cognitive schemata, logic in kinship relations and productivity in subsistence modes. Readers comfortable with definitions and short proofs will get the most from it. It is a natural next step after an introductory course in either networks or kinship.

Out-of-print copies on eBay: Structural Models in Anthropology

An Anatomy of Kinship: Mathematical Models for Structures of Cumulated Roles

Harrison C. White · 1963 · Prentice-Hall

An early book-length mathematical treatment of kinship, published in Prentice-Hall's series on the mathematical analysis of social behavior. White took his lead from André Weil's algebraic appendix to Lévi-Strauss and modeled kinship as a closed set of positions linked by tightly codified relations. Accounts of White's career trace his later work on structural equivalence and blockmodels, now standard tools of network analysis, back to this kinship modeling. It suits readers who already know what a permutation is and want to see where kinship algebra and network analysis share a root. Expect to borrow a library copy and to meet older notation.

Out-of-print copies on eBay: An Anatomy of Kinship

^† Links to shops and to eBay are affiliate links: if you buy through one, we may earn a commission.

Networks

Analyzing Social Networks

Stephen P. Borgatti, Martin G. Everett and Jeffrey C. Johnson · 2018 · SAGE

The second edition of a practical textbook that explains social network analysis step by step in plain language and simple equations, using the UCINET and NetDraw software. Its catalogue description covers the research process as well as the analysis, and this edition gives particular attention to digital and social media data, statistical models such as QAP and ERGM, network structure and centrality, and methods for finding cohesive subgroups. It suits a first course, or a researcher with network data in hand who wants to analyze it properly. Readers of our statistics starter will recognize QAP from the permutation example there.

Island Networks: Communication, Kinship, and Classification Structures in Oceania

Per Hage and Frank Harary · 1996 · Cambridge University Press

The third book from the Hage and Harary partnership, after Structural Models in Anthropology (1983) and Exchange in Oceania (1991). Here graph theory is applied to the island societies of the Pacific and, according to the publisher, presented in a form that readers without mathematical training can follow. The problems include how island empires formed, the social basis of dialect groups, the rise of trade and political centers, the growth and decline of social stratification, changes in marriage and descent systems, the history of kinship terminologies, and the reconstruction of ancestral societies. It suits readers interested in Oceania, especially those who liked the earlier book.

Out-of-print copies on eBay: Island Networks

Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications

Stanley Wasserman and Katherine Faust · 1994 · Cambridge University Press

A standard reference for network methods, at more than 800 pages, published in Cambridge's Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences series. The publisher presents it as the first book to cover the field's methods and applications comprehensively, usable as both a reference and a textbook. The contents run from notation, graphs and matrices through centrality and prestige, cohesive subgroups, structural equivalence and blockmodels to dyads, triads and statistical models. A chapter on relational algebras connects directly to the algebra of kinship. It suits graduate students and anyone who needs a precise definition to cite; it is not a light first read.

Cultural evolution

Cultural Evolution: How Darwinian Theory Can Explain Human Culture and Synthesize the Social Sciences

Alex Mesoudi · 2011 · University of Chicago Press

The most general of the three books in this group. Mesoudi argues that culture is itself an evolutionary process, showing the Darwinian ingredients of variation, competition and inheritance, and that this view can bring the separate social sciences under one framework. The publisher lists topics from fads, public policy and the spread of religion to herd behavior in markets, and stresses the range of methods used to study them: theoretical models, laboratory experiments, archaeological fieldwork and ethnography. It suits newcomers who want the argument and the evidence before any formal models, and it makes a sensible first book before the two below.

Culture and the Evolutionary Process

Robert Boyd and Peter J. Richerson · 1985 · University of Chicago Press

The book in which Boyd and Richerson developed their dual inheritance model, using the methods of population biology to show how genetic and cultural evolution together produce human cultural diversity. The chapter titles show the program: guided variation, biased transmission, natural selection of cultural variations, frequency-dependent bias and the evolution of cooperation, and indirect bias and symbolic traits. Ideas that now appear in every cultural evolution course, such as conformist transmission, are worked out here as mathematical models. It suits readers who are comfortable with algebra and want the original arguments behind the textbook summaries.

Out-of-print copies on eBay: Culture and the Evolutionary Process

Mathematical Models of Social Evolution: A Guide for the Perplexed

Richard McElreath and Robert Boyd · 2007 · University of Chicago Press

A primer written to make students and researchers in biology and the social sciences conversant in the language of evolutionary models. It introduces the mathematical tools typically used to analyze such models and ends each chapter with problems that put them to work. Topics, according to the publisher, include animal conflict, altruism, reciprocity, animal communication, group selection, sex allocation and sexual selection. The stated aim is that readers can follow model-based journal articles and build models of their own. It suits anyone who has met a recursion in a cultural evolution paper and wanted to know how it was derived.

Methods

Research Methods in Anthropology: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches

H. Russell Bernard · 2017 · Rowman & Littlefield

The sixth edition of a standard methods survey, organized around the three parts of a project: research design, data collection and data analysis. The publisher's description lists interviewing, questionnaire construction, participant observation, and direct and indirect observation among the ways of collecting data, with analysis covering both qualitative and quantitative material. Key terms are set in bold, boxes expand on side topics, and an appendix gathers resources for fieldworkers. It is long, at more than 700 pages, and suits students planning a project or a thesis. Bloomsbury Academic lists a seventh edition with Amber Wutich as coauthor.

Systematic Data Collection

Susan C. Weller and A. Kimball Romney · 1988 · Sage

A short book, under 100 pages, in Sage's Qualitative Research Methods series, on collecting field data in a structured, systematic way. Its chapters take the main interview formats one at a time: free listing to define a domain, single and successive pile sorts, triadic comparisons, rating scales, rank ordering, balanced incomplete block designs and sentence frames. The closing chapters deal with reliability, consensus, sample size and validity. Weller and Romney were two of the three authors of "Culture as Consensus" (1986), the paper behind cultural consensus analysis, so the book pairs naturally with that method. It suits students designing a study in cognitive anthropology.

Out-of-print copies on eBay: Systematic Data Collection

Wider reading for general readers

The books in this last group were written for general readers. Several come from network science or genetic genealogy rather than anthropology, and each note says which readers of this site are likely to get the most from it.

The WEIRDest People in the World

Joseph Henrich · 2021 · Picador (paperback; first published 2020)

Few popular books put kinship at the center of history the way this one does. Henrich, an evolutionary anthropologist at Harvard, argues that the medieval Western Church's marriage rules, including its bans on cousin marriage and polygamy, broke up intensive kin groups in Europe. Over centuries, he contends, that change reshaped psychology toward individualism, analytic thinking and trust in strangers; WEIRD stands for Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. The thesis has critics. It suits students of kinship who want to see marriage rules treated as a cause of social change, not only as something to describe.

The Secret of Our Success

Joseph Henrich · 2016 · Princeton University Press

Why can people live in the Arctic or the Kalahari when stranded explorers, lacking local know-how, so often die there? Henrich's answer is cumulative culture: skills, tools and recipes built up over generations, beyond what any one person could invent, which in turn shaped human genes, bodies and minds. His examples include food preparation that removes plant toxins and the loss of skills in small, isolated populations. It is a readable route into the dual inheritance ideas of the Boyd and Richerson books above, and it suits anyone curious about cultural evolution who wants stories before equations.

Friends

Robin Dunbar · 2022 · Little, Brown (paperback; first published 2021)

Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is known for the idea that the human brain limits how many stable relationships a person can keep, the figure called Dunbar's number. He explains where the figure comes from and describes friendships arranged in nested circles, each larger and less intimate than the one inside it. He also covers the time each circle demands, why family and friends compete for the same places, and how friendships fade. Network learners get a worked case of layered personal networks, and students of kinship an argument for counting kin as part of social life.

Connected

Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler · 2011 · Little, Brown (paperback; first published 2009)

A physician-sociologist and a political scientist argue that behaviors and moods spread along social ties. Drawing on decades of records from the Framingham Heart Study, they trace obesity, smoking and happiness through networks of friends, spouses and siblings, and propose that influence reaches about three degrees of separation. Statisticians have since debated whether such data can separate influence from the tendency of similar people to befriend each other. That debate is what makes the book useful to someone learning networks: the claims are stated clearly, and the problem of reading network data is easy to see.

Linked

Albert-László Barabási · 2014 · Basic Books (first published 2002)

Barabási, a physicist, tells how his group found that many real networks, from the World Wide Web to the chemistry inside a cell, have a few hubs with enormous numbers of links and many nodes with only a handful. He traces that pattern to growth and preferential attachment, where newcomers tend to link to nodes that are already well connected. He also covers random graphs, small worlds, and why such networks shrug off random failures yet break down when their hubs are attacked. It suits readers who want the physicist's view of networks before opening a textbook.

Six Degrees

Duncan J. Watts · 2003 · W. W. Norton

Here the small-world problem is told by one of the people who helped solve it. Watts begins with Stanley Milgram's letter-passing experiments, then explains the model he built with the mathematician Steven Strogatz, in which a few random shortcuts make a tightly clustered network suddenly small. Later chapters turn to searching a network, epidemics, fads and cascading failures. Students of kinship will recognize its central tension, between close local clusters and a few long-range ties, wherever marriages link distant villages; network learners get the model's logic without the algebra.

Networks

Mark Newman · 2018 · Oxford University Press

Newman's textbook is the step to take once the popular accounts have done their work. At nearly 800 pages, it covers the kinds of networks studied empirically, the mathematics used to describe them, the algorithms that compute measures on them, and models of how networks form and how things spread across them. Expect matrices, probability and some calculus throughout. It suits graduate students and readers who need precise definitions of centrality, clustering or community structure, and it complements Wasserman and Faust above, which approach many of the same questions from the social science side.

The Family Tree Guide to DNA Testing and Genetic Genealogy

Blaine T. Bettinger · 2019 · Family Tree Books

Written for family historians rather than scientists, Bettinger's guide explains the main kinds of consumer DNA test (autosomal, Y-DNA, mitochondrial and X-DNA) and what each can and cannot show. It covers reading match lists, using the amount of shared DNA to suggest a relationship, treating ethnicity estimates with caution, and applying results to adoption and unknown-parentage cases. This second edition runs to about 270 pages. Family historians who have already tested and want to make sense of their matches will find it practical, and it pairs well with our cousin calculator, which turns a relationship into expected shared DNA.

Unofficial Guide to Ancestry.com

Nancy Hendrickson · 2018 · Family Tree Books

Hendrickson's book is a manual for a single research website: how to search its historical record collections, how to build and manage a family tree there, and how to read its DNA results. This second edition walks through search strategies step by step, with screenshots and timesaving tips for narrowing a search. It assumes no prior experience but has advice for regular users too. The natural reader is a family historian who already holds a subscription. Websites change faster than books, so some screens may look different now, but the search habits it teaches carry over.

It's All Relative

A. J. Jacobs · 2018 · Simon & Schuster (paperback; first published 2017)

Jacobs, a journalist who builds his books around personal experiments, sets out to organize what he hopes will be the largest family reunion ever held, on the premise that everyone alive is a distant cousin of everyone else. On the way he explores crowdsourced world family trees, DNA testing, famous and infamous relatives, and the question of what makes someone family at all. The tone is light and there is no mathematics, yet the arithmetic behind the premise, ancestor slots doubling until they outnumber everyone alive, is easy to try with our pedigree collapse calculator. It suits general readers.

Full publication details for the ten books in this section are listed below.