Exchange In Oceania: A Graph Theoretic Analysis (Oxford Studies In Social And Cultural Anthropology)

Exchange in Oceania: A Graph Theoretic Analysis (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology)

In their previous book, Structural Models in Anthropology, Hage and Haray used graph theory, a branch of pure mathematics, to develop a family of models for the study of social, symbolic, and cognitive relations. With Exchange in Oceania the authors extend these models using ethnographic data from Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia to demonstrate that the language, techniques, and theorems of graph theory provide the essential basis for the description, quantification, simulation, enumeration, and notation of the great variety of exchange forms actually found in Oceanic societies. Review "Most illuminating...[presents] a formalism easy to grasp, which enables one to reduce to common terms several approaches apparently different from each other. This represents a major breakthrough: it clears the ground for a generalized theory of exchange relationships...a great achievement."--Claude L