Human Complex Systems

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.