Lewis Henry Morgan

Lewis Henry Morgan 1818-81, American anthropologist, b. Aurora, N.Y., grad. Union College, Schenectady, 1840. Practicing as a lawyer, he became interested in the Native Americans of his locality, and in 1847 he was made an adopted member of the Seneca tribe. His League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851, repr. 1954) is unexcelled among early descriptive reports. Morgan was interested in social organization, and developed a theory correlating kinship terminologies with forms of marriage and rules of descent, holding that matriarchal patterns had originally prevailed over all other kinship patterns. His Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1870) presents this principle. Ancient Society (1877, repr. 1959), which classified the cultures of the world into progressive stages—savagery, barbarism, and civilization—attracted the attention of Marx and Engels , who interpreted its evolutionary doctrine as support for their materialistic theory of history. Morgan's work was accused of being overly speculative, and provoked a reaction against theories of cultural evolution within American anthropology that lasted well into 20th cent. Ethnographic and archaeological research has invalidated Morgan's specific evolutionary models, but his tireless research and his wide-ranging theoretical interests are credited with serving to advance the new field of anthropology. Morgan's Indian Journals were edited by Leslie A. White and published in 1959.

Bibliography: See biographies by B. J. Stern (1931, repr. 1967) and C. Resek (1960); study by T. R. Trautman (1987).

Morgan, Lewis Henry (1818–1881), anthropologist.A Rochester, New York, lawyer, Lewis Henry Morgan played a leading role in establishing anthropology in the United States and through his writings gained worldwide influence. Interested in the Indians of his area, he became an honorary Seneca in 1847. Morgan chiefly studied kinship, one of the two central topics around which anthropology arose (the other being “primitive” religion). Indeed, he largely invented kinship as an anthropological subject, making it the focus of his three major books. The League of the Iroquois (1851) documented the matrilineal family relationships underlying the Iroquois's political structure. His masterwork, the massive Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871), published by the Smithsonian Institution, compared kinship systems worldwide, arguing that American Indian systems were similar among themselves and to those of Asia, so proving the Indians’ Asian origins. In this work, Morgan created most of the basic analytic tools still used in kinship analysis. Ancient Society (1877) integrated his kinship studies into an evolutionary framework, drawing all societies into a unitary story of progress. Writing at a time when the great antiquity of human history had suddenly become evident, Morgan theorized a progressive series of kinship stages, from “primitive promiscuity” through matriarchy and patriarchy to monogamy, thus thoroughly historicizing contemporary marriage norms. This work appealed to a diverse range of groups and individuals, including feminists; the evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin; the conservative English legal historian Sir Henry Maine; and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who believed that Morgan's evolutionary kinship model strengthened their materialist view of history.
See also Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Iroquois Confederacy.

Bibliography

Elisabeth Tooker , The Structure of the Iroquois League: Lewis H. Morgan's Research and Observations, Ethnohistory 30 (1983): 141–54.
Thomas R. Trautmann , Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship, 1987.

Thomas Trautmann