Houses and Houselife of the American Aboriginies

by Lewis Henry Morgan

A classic, available again.Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) was trained as a lawyer, but in the second part of his life he focused his attention on the emerging science of ethnography.Covering areas of North and Central America, Morgan’s last book, Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines was the first to regard a set of problems that is still currently debated: what does domestic architecture show anthropologists and archaeologists about social organization, and how does social organization combine with a system of production technology and ecological adjustment to influence domestic and public architecture? As William Longacre makes clear in the new introduction, the development of anthropological archaeology was profoundly affected by this book, and its impact continues to resonate.Demonstrating a lack of ethnocentrism rare for his day, Morgan gathered most of his own data from the field and from a gigantic correspondence. The result is a lively, readable work that is still fascinating and instructive today.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, Architecture

Library Binding

First published January 1, 1881

About the author

Lewis Henry Morgan was a pioneering American anthropologist and social theorist, and one of the greatest social scientists of the nineteenth century in the United States. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois. Due to his study of kinship, Morgan was an early proponent of the theory that the indigenous peoples of the Americas had migrated from Asia in ancient times. His social theories influenced later Leftist theorists. Morgan is the only American social theorist to be cited by Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud.

Reviews

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lewis Morgan, a Rochester lawyer and businessman, was largely ignored by anthropologists from 1930 to 1960. Morgan was an influence on Engels, whose book on family IS Morgan, with minor modifications (editor Paul Bohanan, page vi of 1881 intro). The new view out of Morgan is "cultural evolution" or "social Darwinism," despite Morgan himself's being bourgeois and Protestant (though not "saved").

Morgan writes: "Throughout aboriginal America the gens took its name from some animal or inanimate object and never from a person. In this early condition of society the individuality of persons was lost in the gens." Say, the Crane gens of the Ojibwa claimed descent from the Crane"(8). In some tribes, the gens members would not eat the animal whose name they bear.
Iroquois "gentes," [no marriage in the gens] for all the tribes: Senecas, Cayugas, Onandagas, Oneidas, Mohawk, Tuscarora. Gentes: 1) Wolf, 2) Bear, 3) Turtle, 4) Beaver, 5) Deer, 6) Heron, 7) Eel, 8) Hawk, 9) Bull. For example, among the Mohawk: Great Turtle, Yellow Wolf, Little Turtle, Eel.
Such gentes had brotherhoods or associations called "Phratries." (p.7)
The silent, mythic Hä-ya-went'-hä, and his spokesman Da-gä-no-wé-da. (27) Were they exceptions to the gentes?

Morgan says Bernal Diaz exaggerates in regard to Montezuma, who did not have a table, but two skins; or that Montezuma ate while thousands watched (270).