Everything about Lewis H Morgan totally explained
Lewis Henry Morgan (
November 21,
1818 –
December 17,
1881) was an American
ethnologist,
anthropologist and
writer. Nevertheless, his professional life was in the field of
law. As an amateur scholar, he's best known for his work on
cultural evolution and
Native Americans.
Biography
Born in rural
Rochester, Morgan studied law at
Union College in
1840 and began practicing in his home town of
Aurora, New York as well as Rochester. Morgan was a prominent man who received many accolades during his lifetime. He served in the
New York State Assembly and Senate, was elected president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in
1879, and was a member of the
National Academy of Sciences. He died in
1881.
Work in ethnology
Morgan became interested in the
Native Americans of his region and helped form a club (Grand Order of the Iroquois) to promote the interests of the tribe, the
Iroquois. He was formally incorporated into their society as an adopted member of the Iroquois tribe with the name
Tayadaowuhkuh, meaning
bridging the gap (between the Iroquois and the
whites).
With the help of his
Seneca tribe friend
Ely S. Parker of the Tonawanda Creek Reservation, he 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.
Developments in the field of anthropology mean that Morgan's legacy is far from simple. 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. His evolutionary views of the three major stages of social evolution,
savagery,
barbarism, and
civilization, were proposed in
Ancient Society. They are divided 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, organisations or ideologies have their beginning in the change of technology. His theory became an important milestone in the development of
social Darwinism.
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels relied on his accounts of the evolution of indigenous peoples to fill in their own account of the development of capitalist society. As a result many come to his writings from a leftist or
Marxist point of view. Within the discipline of anthropology authors such as
Leslie White championed Morgan's legacy while
Franz Boas attacked it. Today many of the specific aspects of Morgan's evolutionary position have been rejected and unilinear theories of evolution are not highly regarded, but connections between material culture and social structure remain objects of anthropological interest. Moreover, many anthropologists recognize that Morgan was one of the first people to systematically study
kinship systems and there's a prestigious annual lecture memorializing Morgan given each year at the Anthropology Department of the
University of Rochester.
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