Lewis H. Morgan

Lewis Henry Morgan (born November 21, 1818 – died December 17, 1881) was an American ethnologist, anthropologist and writer. Often regarded as the founder of American anthropology, he is best known for his work on cultural evolution and the kinship system.

Life

Lewis Henry Morgan was born in rural Rochester, New York, just south of the town of Aurora. His parents, Jedediah and Harriet Morgan, were of New England stock. Morgan graduated from Cayuga Academy in Aurora, and then went on to study law at Union College in Schenectady, New York. He received an A.B. degree in 1840 and began practicing in Aurora. In 1844 he opened a law office in Rochester.

Parallel to his work as a lawyer, Morgan studied the Classics of Ancient Greece and Rome. He was enchanted with exotic and ancient cultures and deeply admired Native American Indians. He joined a young men's social club in Rochester and eventually renamed it into “Grand Order of Iroquois”, after an Indian tribe of Iroquois. His book Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851) became a bestseller.

On August 13, 1851 Morgan married Mary Elizabeth Steele.

Morgan became an attorney for the Seneca tribe in late 1840s, and helped them in the Congress to fight for their land against the Ogden Land Company. The Seneca eventually adopted Morgan into their tribe and gave him the name "Tayadaowuhkuh" or "One-bridging-the-gap" (a bridge between the Indians and white man).

In 1950s Morgan invested into mining and railroad ventures, and managed to accumulate a small fortune. After that he decided to spend more time on anthropology and pursue his interest in it more scientifically. He noticed that North American Indians have a specific kinship system and decided to study it more in depth. Morgan eventually became the first person to classify the Indian kinship system of relationship, in his The Indian Journals (1859-62).

While meeting with and studying Indian tribes, Morgan made frequent trips to the northern wilderness, where he became interested in the habits of the beaver. He published his The American Beaver and His Works in 1868. Morgan served in the State Legislature as a Member of Assembly in 1861, representing the city of Rochester. He was elected a Senator in 1867, serving for only a year.

Morgan published numerous smaller papers on ethnology in the 1860s and 1870s. He however remains famous for his masterpiece – Ancient Society (1877) – in which he introduced his cultural evolutionary theory. Morgan received his LL. D. in 1873. He was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1879.

Morgan died at his home in Rochester, New York on December 17, 1881. His estate became a part of the University of Rochester, hosting a college for women.

Work

With the help of his Seneca tribe friend Ely S. Parker of the Tonawanda Creek Reservation, Morgan studied the culture of the Iroquois and produced the book, The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851). This volume became one of the earliest examples of ethnography, and these initial researches led him to consider more general questions of human social organization. In keeping with the general interest in social evolution common to his times, he began publishing books such as his seminal Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871) and Houses and House-lives of the American Aborigines (1881). His goal was to explain the wide variety of kinship systems in indigenous societies as different stages in human evolution and social development. Morgan conducted four expeditions in the period from 1859 and 1862. He traveled to the West, up the Missouri River as far as western Montana, collecting information on kinship terminology and other aspects of Native Indian culture.

Like Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor, Morgan was a proponent of social evolution. He proposed a unilinear scheme of evolution from primitive to modern, through which he believed societies progressed. He saw Western civilization as the pinnacle of human development, and modeled the development of all other societies in the image of the development of the Western world.

His evolutionary views were divided into three major stages of social evolution, first proposed in Ancient Society:

savagery - the lowest stage of development, where people relied on hunting and collecting of plants for survival; no soil tilling or animal domestication on this level;
barbarism – middle level of development, when people started to domesticate animals and learn the techniques of agriculture and pottery;
civilization – the highest stage, which starts with the art of writing.

The first two stages were further divided into sub-stages, for the total of seven stages. Morgan divided stages by technological inventions, like fire, bow, pottery in savage era, domestication of animals, agriculture, metalworking in barbarian era and alphabet and writing in civilization era. Thus Morgan introduced a link between the social progress and technological progress. Morgan viewed the technological progress as a force behind the social progress, and any social change — in social institutions, organizations or ideologies have their beginning in the change of technology. His theory became an important milestone in the development of social Darwinism.

Legacy

Morgan’s work pawed important path in the development of both the concept of cultural evolution and the social Darwinism. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels relied on Morgan’s accounts of the evolution of indigenous peoples to fill in their own account of the development of capitalist society. As a result, many see Morgan’s work in the light of Marxism.

Within the discipline of anthropology authors such as Leslie White championed Morgan's legacy while Franz Boas attacked it. Today Morgan's evolutionary position is widely discredited and unilinear theories of evolution are not highly regarded. However, many anthropologists recognize that Morgan was one of the first people to systematically study kinship systems and there is a prestigious annual lecture memorializing Morgan given each year at the Anthropology Department of the University of Rochester.

Publications

Morgan, Lewis H. 1859. Circular, laws of consanguinity, and descent of the Iroquois. Rochester, N.Y.: Steam Press of A. Strong & Co.
Morgan, Lewis H. 1868. A conjectural solution of the origin of the classificatory system of relationship. Cambridge: Welch, Bigelow, and Co.
Morgan, Lewis H. 1872. The city of the sea. New York: Harper and Bros
Morgan, Lewis H. 1922 (original published in 1851). The League of the Ho-De-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois (2 Volumes). Reprint Services Corporation. ISBN 0781251605
Morgan, Lewis H. 1950 (original published in 1876). Montezuma's dinner: An essay on the tribal society of North American Indians. New York Labor News Co.
Morgan, Lewis H. 1959. The Indian journals 1859-62. University of Michigan Press
Morgan, Lewis H. 1982 (original published in 1877). Ancient Society. University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0816509247
Morgan, Lewis H. 1986 (original published in 1868). The American Beaver: A Classic of Natural History and Ecology. Dover Publications. ISBN 0486249956
Morgan, Lewis H. 1997 (original published in 1871). Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 0803282303
Morgan, Lewis H. 2003 (original published in 1881). Houses & House - Life of the American Aborigines. University of Utah Press. ISBN 0874807549

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Fortes, Meyer. 1970. Kinship and the social order: The legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. The Lewis Henry Morgan lectures, 1963. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co.
Lewis Henry Morgan. Rochester’s History www.vintageviews.com. Retrieved on May 19, 2007, <http://www.vintageviews.org/vv-tl/Photos/pages/morgan.html>
Resek, Carl. 1960. Lewis Henry Morgan, American scholar. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stern, Bernhard Joseph. 1931. Lewis Henry Morgan, social evolutionist. Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago press.
Tooker, Elisabeth. 1994. Lewis H. Morgan on Iroquois material culture. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 0816513473
Trautmann, Thomas R. 1987. Lewis Henry Morgan and the invention of kinship. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0520058496

External links

Ancient Society – Full-text online edition of Lewis H. Morgan’s book
L.H. Morgan Papers - Collection of Morgan’s works
Lewis H. Morgan – Biography on BookRags.com
Lewis H. Morgan and Ely Parker – On the relationship of these two people, on PBS website
Lewis Henry Morgan – Biography on Minnesota State University website
Lewis Henry Morgan & Victorian Secret Societies – Chapter I in Gilbert H. Herd’s book Secrecy and cultural reality: Utopian ideologies of the New Guinea men’s house
Nineteenth Century Social Evolutionism – An article by Kelly Chakov

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