Add to ORKGKinship, like language, is a structure, not a sub-stance.1 The distinctive features of kinship networks reside less in how their constitutive ties – be they biological, jural, ritual, symbolic, or whatever – are defined and established than in the way these ties are organized. Kinship network theory is thus not just another “application ” of general network theoretic methods to a particular social domain but a specific branch of social network theory in itself, defined by its own axioms and described by its own theorems. Kinship networks are characterized by the interplay of three fundamental principles: filia-tion, marriage, and gender. We ordinarily repre-sent filiation by a set of arcs (descent arcs) that ar