The original pinpointing sheets, 2/3rds prepared by Murdock and 1/3rd by White, are printed here in the same font as they were originally typescript, with only minor spelling corrections. Only the first 113 pinpointing sheets were published in 1988 (World Cultures 4#4).

This review presents studies in various world regions. Each uses network analysis software designed explicitly for kinship studies with explicit network measures of cohesion. It presents evidence of fundamental differences in the forms of marital cohesion that show profoundly different effects over a wide range of social phenomena, regional scales, and diverse cultures. Social cohesion is the basis of mutuality, cooperation and well-being in human societies (Council of Europe, 2009). It includes the modes by which people are assimilated into societies, how groups hold power, stratify social relations, and manage the flow of resources. Kinship networks in the civil societies of nation-states, in contrast to smaller-scale societies, are far too rarely studied as a basis of social cohesion. Networks, the social tissues of our lives, are only partially visible to us; thus we fail to see how these are wrapped and embedded in larger networks. Thus the importance, as emphasized here, of an explicit science of social network analysis for kinship studies both at local and larger scales. The analyses of cohesive subsets show how constructions of social class, ethnicity, migration, inheritance, social movements, and other large- as well as small-scale social phenomena are implicated in kinship networks.

The feature of Dravidian kinship terminology is typically that male lines on ego’s “side” marry and call their “affines” relatives in a set of opposing male lines. The egocentric versus sociocentric debate in Anthropology over the social network implications of Dravidian terminology is resolved with proof of a single theorem: For a connected network A of marriages between consanguineals, including only the additional ancestral relatives leading back to the consanguineal ancestors of those couples, then if the kin of the couples are consistently sided egocentrically, according to Dravidian kinship terminology, then all relatives in network A are consistently sided sociocentrically, whether sides are defined through opposing sides V of male kin, U of female kin, or both. Two other theorems prove that if all the consanguineal marriages in network A are same generation (same number of generations back to the common ancestor for the husband as for the wife) then if sidedness is V it is also U, if U it is also V. Finally if network A is both U and V then all of its marriages are same generation and the marriage structure of A is one of implicit alternate-generational moieties, as in a Kariera kinship network.

BdA’s model does a service by clarifying the precise structure of Trautmann’s paradigm of Dravidian South Asian (DSA) kin term structure (KTS) as rewrite rules: expressions in an algebra of Dravidian KTS that can be only shortened by rewrite rules. It imposes a “Dravidian cross-cousin marriage rule” expounded at great effort by Trautmann: “I do not hesitate to reconstruct for the Proto-Dravidian kinship system not only a terminology but a rule of social organization” contra “Sheffler’s [ineffectual] counterargument that the rule and the semantic contrast are not invariable concomitants of one another …. The question is no longer whether a cross-cousin marriage rule is ancestrally Dravidian, but what precise form that ancestral rule took” (Trautmann 1981:235-236). I will refer to BdA’s model as “the Trautmann algebra” (Tjon Sie Fat and Trautmann, 1998), so as to expose its weaknesses independently of BdA’s model since I would expect that after reviewing the commentaries BdA would modify his current model into a paradigmatic form that accords historically and ethnographically with Dravidian terminological variants. There is no loss here in the value of Trautmann’s groundbreaking work, but a significant gain in improving the quality of his model of Dravidian KTS.