Political relations among 16 Gahuku-Gama sub-tribes of the central highlands of New Guinea, as reported in Read's (1954) ethnography. This is one of the canonical datasets for the study of structural balance and of networks containing negative ties, since the sub-tribes stand in one of two mutually exclusive relations:

  • weight > 0 records rova, a relation of political alliance

  • weight < 0 records hina, a relation of political opposition

Each relation holds between 29 pairs of sub-tribes. No pair of sub-tribes stands in both relations, and pairs with no recorded political relation are simply absent.

data(irps_tribes)

Format

#> -- # Gahuku-Gama Sub-tribes ----------------------------------------------------
#> # A labelled, signed, undirected network of 16 sub-tribes and 58 political ties
#>
#> -- Nodes
#> # A tibble: 16 x 1
#>   label
#>   <chr>
#> 1 Gavev
#> 2 Kotun
#> 3 Ove
#> 4 Alika
#> 5 Nagam
#> 6 Gahuk
#> # i 10 more rows
#>
#> -- Ties
#> # A tibble: 58 x 3
#>    from    to weight
#>   <int> <int>  <dbl>
#> 1     1     2      1
#> 2     3     4      1
#> 3     3     6      1
#> 4     3     7      1
#> 5     5     7      1
#> 6     6     7      1
#> # i 52 more rows
#>

Source

Sub-tribe names have been title-cased. The date recorded is that of Read's publication; his fieldwork in the Asaro valley preceded it by some years.

Details

The network is held as a 'stocnet' object, so that the metadata reported in the GRAND statement can be recorded in its info component, including where and when the relations were observed and by what method. As is the convention for 'stocnet' objects, the sign of each relation is held as a negative or positive weight rather than in a separate 'sign' column.

References

Read, Kenneth E. 1954. "Cultures of the Central Highlands, New Guinea". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 10(1): 1-43. doi:10.1086/soutjanth.10.1.3629074

Everett, Martin G., and Stephen P. Borgatti. 2014. "Networks containing negative ties". Social Networks 38: 111-120. doi:10.1016/j.socnet.2014.03.005