La parenté en chiffres

Résumé En

Kinship and its numerical history. This piece begins by considering the importance of numbers of kin to the study of social structure in thepast, the present and the future. It insists that there is no known method of recovering all the kin links ofan individual or a community. This is true for the present, but it is much more so for the past. This makes it impossible to compare the size of kinship networks of individuals or of communities between periods or between places. The rest of the article discusses a method for simulating the numbers, sexes and ages of the relatives of individuals from information about births, marriages and deaths characteristic of the time at which these individuals lived. The technique used, microsimulation, using probablistic methods, is summarized and a small selection of the very large number of available results arepresented. These include the fact that kinship numbers vary over time and may have changea quite rapidly from period to period in the past. Kin numbers are being relentlessly reduced over time: in the extreme case of contemporary one-child China, if the policy of drastic fertility reduction continues, all kinship links except the vertical will gradually disappear. An appendix specifies the microsimulation System, CAMSIM, which has been used and four tables of numerical results are presented.