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New Genealogy: It's Not Just for Kinship Anymore

Washington State University

Edward H. Hagen

Washington State University

Genealogy has been a pillar of anthropological research since the earliest ethnographic fieldwork. A turn toward demographically and quantitatively oriented kinship studies in the 1960s highlighted the need for more systematic genealogical methods. New computer-assisted, iterative field methods were developed in response. These methods can dramatically improve data quality and quantity and are remarkably flexible. Here, the authors outline an iterative genealogical approach that has been used to study kinship, migration, education, alcoholism, food sharing, intragroup aggression, father absence, community fissioning, and land ownership. The authors demonstrate the reliability of these data and show how they can be analyzed. The unobtrusive genealogical methods outlined here could be used to study terminologies and cognitive models of kinship; however, the authors focus on applications to demography, epidemiology, and economics.

Key Words: demography • epidemiology • population structure • quantitative methods • scientific ethnography

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