This book is a comprehensive analysis of many aspects of social structure including family, clan, community, kinship terminology, social organization, regulation of sex, incest taboos, and sexual choice.

This study re-examines the hypothesis of Sapir (1916) regarding the relationship between levirate and sororate and kinship terminology. The author critiques Murdock’s (1947) work on this topic and performs his own analysis for four hypotheses. Results suggest that “the levirate and sororate are significantly correlated to the occurrence of bifurcate merging terminology and step-bifurcate collateral terminology” (352). Exceptions to this finding are also discussed.

This paper examines the distribution and diffusion of the seven patterns of sibling classifaction given by the author. The author then studies the association between descent and sibling terminology.

This paper presents a comprehensive list of kinship patterns for grandparents, grandchildren, uncles, aunts, nieces and nephews, siblings, cross-cousins, and siblings-in-law. The author based these typologies on over 1000 kinship terminologies from around the world. The geographical distributions of kinship patterns are also included.

Kinbank is a global database of 210,903 kinship terms derived from 1,229 spoken and signed languages. The authors created Kinbank as a tool to help explain recurring patterns across cultures through kinship terminology. They illustrate its usefulness by addressing two questions as an example: 1) Is there gender bias in the phonological structure of parent terms? and 2) Did bifurcate-merging terminology and cross-cousin marriage co-evolve in Bantu languages? Using a Bayesian phylogenetic approach, the authors find support for the first question, but none for the latter.

This paper tests the proximity hypothesis (used by Murdock [1949]) which posits that residential propinquity will be associated with parent-in-law avoidance and kin terminology. Several operational hypotheses are tested but none are supported. The author suggests that this finding may cast doubt other hypotheses that underlie Murdock’s findings, such as the participation hypothesis.

After noticing that there are no cross-cultural phylogenetic studies of grandparent terminologies, the authors use the record from 134 Pama-Nyungan languages to explore the evolution of this kinship category and to evaluate the effects of social structures in this evolution. The authors suggest that there used to be four different terms for grandparents in the proto-Pama-Nyungan language family, which was supported by the data. The results show no evidence of co-evolution between these grandparent systems with neither community marriage organization nor post-marital residence. There is not a significant correlation between grandparent and cross-cousin terms; however, there is some evidence that grand-child terms are correlated to grandparent systems.

This chapter explores and tests some propositions about matrilineal societies. Supplementary to that discussion, the author also explores the problems of method associated with the use of coded data on large samples of cultures.

This study examines Crow and Omaha kinship terminologies, cross-cousin marriage practices, and descent rules. Several hypotheses relating these three variables are tested.

This dissertation discusses the divided theoretical approach to how reincarnation, animism, spirits, and general religious beliefs occur within societies cross-culturally. Matlock offers evidence to support Tyler, contradicting the generally accepted Durkheimian approach, arguing that the belief about souls and spirits may originate in dreams and other empirical experiences, in turn informing and shaping social organization. Durkheim argued the opposite, claiming that religious beliefs reflect social organization such as the clan and kinship. The author states 33 quantitative hypotheses to be tested using 30 of the first 60 sample societies available in the HRAF Probability Sample.