MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 2 NO. 3 JULY 2008 ANTHROPOLOGY, MATHEMATICS, KINSHIP: A TRIBUTE TO THE ANTHROPOLOGIST PER HAGE 1 AND HIS WORK WITH THE MATHEMATICIAN FRANK HARARY DAVID JENKINS ROUNDHOUSE INSTITUTE FOR FIELD STUDIES
[email protected] COPYRIGHT 2008 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY AUTHOR SUBMITTED: MAY 1, 2008 ACCEPTED: JUNE 15, 2008 MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ISSN 1544-5879 1 A version of this paper was prepared for the 105th Annual American Anthropological Association Meeting. Session title: Kinship and Language: Per Hage (1935 – 2004) Memorial Session. San Jose, California, November 14 – 18, 2006. JENKINS: ANTHROPOLOGY, MATHEMATICS, KINSHIP WWW.MATHEMATICALANTHROPOLOGY.ORG MATHEMATICAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND CULTURAL THEORY: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL VOLUME 2 NO. 3 JULY 2008 ANTHROPOLOGY, MATHEMATICS, KINSHIP: A TRIBUTE TO THE ANTHROPOLOGIST PER HAGE AND HIS WORK WITH THE MATHEMATICIAN FRANK HARARY DAVID JENKINS ROUNDHOUSE INSTITUTE FOR FIELD STUDIES Abstract: Over a long and productive career, Per Hage produced a diverse and influential body of work. He conceptualized and solved a range of anthropological problems, often with the aid of mathematical models from graph theory. In three books and many research articles, Hage, and his mathematician collaborator Frank Harary, developed innovative analyses of exchange relations, including marriage, ceremonial, and resource exchange. They advanced network models for the study of communication, language evolution, kinship and classification. And they demonstrated that graph theory provides an analytical framework that is both subtle enough to preserve culturally specific relations and abstract enough to allow for genuine cross-cultural comparison. With graph theory, two common analytical problems in anthropology can be avoided: the problem of hiding cultural phenomena with weak cross-cultural generalizations, and the problem of making misleading comparisons based on incomparable levels of abstraction.