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Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881)

Morgan made kinship an object of comparative study and wrote Ancient Society, a stage theory of human society in which every people follows one line of progress. His work among the Seneca led him to notice that they classed relatives in a way unlike English, and to find, by collecting kinship terms from peoples across the world, that the pattern recurred; he took the recurring systems as fossils of earlier forms of the family. Ancient Society (1877) arranged the history of humanity in a single sequence of ethnical periods, from savagery through barbarism to civilisation, each opened by an advance in the arts of subsistence. Friedrich Engels built his account of the origin of the family and the state on it.

Lewis Henry Morgan was born on 21 November 1818 near Aurora, New York. He studied at Union College, graduating in 1840, and practised law in Rochester, later making a fortune in railroads and iron mining in Michigan. As a young man he helped found a fraternal society modelled on the Iroquois, the Grand Order of the Iroquois, and through his friendship with the Seneca Ely S. Parker he came to study the Haudenosaunee themselves; he took the Seneca’s side against the Ogden Land Company, and in 1847 was adopted into the Hawk clan. He served in the New York State Assembly and Senate. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He died in Rochester on 17 December 1881.

Key concepts

The League of the Iroquois. League of the Ho-dé-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois (1851), written with Parker’s help, described the political organisation, kinship and religion of the Haudenosaunee confederacy as a working system in its own right.

Systems of kinship. Morgan found that the Seneca called their father’s brothers “father” and their mother’s sisters “mother”, and on a trip west found the same among the Ojibwa. Through questionnaires and travel he collected the kinship terminologies of peoples on several continents and published them in Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (Smithsonian, 1871), the book with which, on Thomas Trautmann’s account in Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship (1987), kinship became a field of study. He distinguished descriptive systems, like the English, which keep lineal and collateral relatives apart, from classificatory systems, which merge them, and argued that the terms preserve the marriage forms of earlier stages after the forms themselves have gone.

Ethnical periods. Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877) divided history into savagery and barbarism, each in lower, middle and upper status, followed by civilisation. Each period began with an advance in the arts of subsistence or technology: fishing and the use of fire, the bow and arrow, pottery, the domestication of animals and irrigated cultivation, the smelting of iron, and finally the phonetic alphabet and writing. Alongside them ran the growth of the ideas of government, the family and property. Humanity, on this account, had followed a single line of progress, and living peoples stood at different points on it.

Engels and Marx. Karl Marx made extensive notes on Ancient Society in 1880–81, and Friedrich Engels drew on those notes and on the book in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), making Morgan’s sequence the anthropological foundation of historical materialism’s account of early society.

Where Morgan stops

The kinship argument was contested from the start. John Ferguson McLennan, whose Primitive Marriage (1865) had proposed a different history of the family, argued in Studies in Ancient History (1876) that classificatory terms were forms of address rather than records of past marriage, so that no history of the family could be read from them. The stages were the target of the next generation. Franz Boas’s “The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology” (1896) argued that the ethnographic record did not show a single sequence and that the comparative method assumed the unity of development it claimed to find.

Key works

See also: Evolution · The stage schemes · Deep time and evolution · Boas · Spencer · Marx · L. White