Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship

by Thomas R. Trautmann

Lewis Henry Morgan of Rochester, New York, lawyer and pioneering anthropologist, was the leading American contributor of his generation to the social sciences. Among the classic works whose conjunction in the 1860s gave modern anthropology its shape, Morgan’s massive and technical Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family was decisive. Thomas R. Trautmann offers a new interpretation of the genesis of “kinship” and of the role it played in late nineteenth-century intellectual history. This Bison Books edition features a new introduction and appendices by the author.

312 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

Reviews

[Dan Gorman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thorough study of Morgan's contributions to the anthropological study of human kinship and Morgan's understanding of time. Morgan believed that he was civilized, while indigenous populations were somewhere between savagery and barbarism, but this ethnocentric view did not stop him from amassing a huge amount of information on global family systems. He proved that most of humanity uses only two possible models for organizing families. Considering Morgan had no computers in the 1860s — he relied entirely on letters from foreign missionaries — the enormity of this feat is impressive. One of my classmates called this the first "big data" project. Trautmann provides real insight into the significance of paleontology, Darwinian evolution, and geology in upsetting religious traditions. I disagree with Trautmann's claim that Darwin had only a minor influence on Morgan's thought. In my reading of Morgan, Darwin gave him extra justification for his theory of human social evolution. This book is for anthropologists, intellectual historians, and anyone interested in the history of philosophy, but not casual readers.

[Mir]

In this work Trautmann endeavors to make up the shortcomings of his earlier study of Morgan, Dravidian Kinship; it is, essentially, a biography of Morgan's 1871 publication Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family.

Morgan's work was built on the similarity of semantic patternings in Iroquois and Dravidian languages. Two key ideas in Morgan's work were stepwise historical evolutionism expressing belief in the law of progress and treelike historical process of the progressive differentiation of systems through time, the latter concept borrowed from philology. Morgan thought that one could abstract the distinctive features of a system by a comparison of all its instances, for instance by analyzing the relation of kinship terminology to rules of marriage.

Recommended for those interested in the formation of modern anthropology and ethnology in the 1860s and the influences on its key figures.