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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.