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Computer processing of the phenomena of consanguinity in anthropology and in history : an integrated approach
ANR. Not thematic programme 2005
Plan co-ordinated by Michael Houseman (manager d' Etudes in EPHE - Vth section, Donatecarcenter.com-IVRY) and Cyril Grange (Centres Roland Mousnier, UMR 8596, UP IV - NATIONAL CENTRE FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH)
This plan gathers ethnologists and historians of the family whose researches are enlivened by the same ambition : the systematic analysis of the relations of consanguinity and of alliance.
Pooling materials and competences peculiar to these two disciplines, the team will try to develop new conceptual and technical tools for the computer processing of the phenomena of consanguinity.
This plan registers in the extension of recent jobs which, leaning on software for the analysis of genealogical data, opened a new empirical way to the study of the practices of consanguinity and of marriage. He will therefore set out to constitute and to exploit a significant number of genealogical corpus which concerns Western societies in different epochs or populations in other regions.
This plan will approach these genealogical collections under an angle which makes them directly comparable, to know, that of networks which result from connections between the numerous relations of derivation and of marriage composing this corpus. The analysis of these networks on the phenomena of "Renchaînement" will be centered . Indeed, even to populations which allow, or even prescribe unions between related, only a minority circuits within network marriages between blood relations are. The vast majority make intercede one or several marriages and, as such, correspond to renchaînements of alliance. However, a modelling of this phenomenon is confronted with two types of problems :
(1) a conjugal network, of relatively reduced size, contains a very big number of renchaînements of a very big number of types ;
(2) this renchaînements is overlapped to some in others to form complex shapes conceptualisation of which is only at its beginning.
This plan aims at including better principles governing the aggregation of conjugal practices, and to overcome difficulties which puts down the systematic analysis of the renchaînements of alliance. His objectives are therefore theoretical and technical at the same time. More precisely, he will try to develop computer processings of genealogical corpus which answers two types of conceived question settings as supplementary :
The one is the properly anthropological ambition to highlight, in a comparative optics, in recurrent forms of organisation. Networks of consanguinity are envisaged here as systems, that is to say as structured totality governed by internal dynamics modelling of which remains to make.
Other one is historical and ethnographic worry to identify the actors accurately and their social attributes within considered networks of consanguinity. These networks indeed give a field favoured to the study of social functioning and of its evolution, also answering external determinations in the consanguinity in the strict sense (social and occupational routes, residential choices, etc.).
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