American Beaver & His Works

by Lewis Henry Morgan

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Genres: Nature

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1868

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

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a fascinating book. I read this for a dissertation chapter I was writing on pre-colonial water infrastructure. Morgan is such a complicated figure. On the one hand definitely involved in weird red-face stuff as described in Philip J. Deloria's Playing Ind*an, but also an advocate for Haudenosaunee land claim campaigns and friend of the Nation. A capitalist involved in the construction of railways to extract iron ore minerals from Indigenous land and the construction of anthropological categories of civilized and savage (I think here of Fanon: “A hostile, ungovernable, and fundamentally rebellious Nature is in fact synonymous in the colonies with the bush, the mosquitoes, the natives, and disease. Colonization has succeeded once this untamed Nature has been brought under control. Cutting railroads through the bush, draining swamps, and ignoring the political and economic existence of the native population are in fact one and the same thing.”) ...yet also Morgan was a proto-Marxist whose writings on the Haudenosaunee fascinated Marx, whose ethnological notebooks on Morgan's work was turned by Engels into Origin of the Family, with a subtitle literally mentioning Morgan: "in the Light of the Researches of Lewis H. Morgan".

This work though is honestly such a wonderful introduction to beavers. Morgan early argued, long before he wrote this book, for the intelligence of animals which could not be explained by instinct alone. It really is remarkable what beavers do collectively to construct dams, the networks of canals, the techniques of felling trees into the direction of water, the coordination of moving materials into place, systems of surveillance, maintenance, and repair. They truly are such fascinating creatures. Morgan noted how the beaver dams he saw while on surveying trips out to plot the route of railway tracks, must have been centuries old, cared for by many generations of beavers. This remains the case, as many of the dams Morgan documented are still actively used and repaired today by beavers, as as this post in Science details. It obviously has blindspots and particular preoccupations, even things that more recent scientific inquiry has proved mistaken, but another wonderful Indigenous text on beavers to read alongside this work is Leanne Simpson's Short History of the Blockade.

[Dan Gorman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Beavers, But Were Afraid to Ask.