Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 – 1881). One of the most influential evolutionary theorists of the 19th century, he has been called the father of American anthropology. An American lawyer whose interest in Iroquois Indian affairs led him to study their customs and social system, giving rise to the first modern ethnographic study of a Native American group, the League of the Iroquois in 1851. In this work, he considered ceremonial, religious, and political aspects of Iroquoian social life.
He also initiated his study of kinship and marriage which he was later to develop into a classical comparative theory in his work, Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of Human Family (1871). This latter work is widely considered to be a milestone in the development of anthropology, establishing kinship and marriage as central areas of anthropological inquiry and beginning an enduring preoccupation with kinship terminologies as the key to the interpretation of kinship systems.
His Ancient Society is the most influential statement of the nineteenth-century cultural evolutionary position. Adopting Montesquieu’s categories of (Seymour-Smith 1986:201).
Criticisms on L.H Morgan
- The followers of the social evolution theory were referred to as “Arm Chair Anthropologists” by the next generation of anthropologists
- Anthropologists like Franz Boas, Margret Mead and others of the American School disapproved of the theory of unilineal evolution based on psychic unity of mankind as it failed to take into account the cultural variations. Herein, Morgan’s theory of evolution based on technological progress came under the scanner as the examples from the Polynesian cheifdoms, showed complex political systems, but with no trace of pottery (Eriksen, 2008).
- Morgan believed that family units became progressively smaller and more self-contained as human society developed. However, his postulated sequence for the evolution of the family is not supported by the enormous amount of ethnographic data that has been collected since his time. For example, no recent society that Morgan would call savage indulges in group marriage or allows brother-sister mating. In short, a most damning criticism of this early social evolutionary approach is that as more data became available, the proposed sequences did not reflected the observations of professionally trained fieldworkers.
- Westermarck (1853-1936) who had done a detailed study of the institution of marriage concluded that the family emerged due to male possessiveness and jealousy. In his work The History of Human Marriage (1922) he asserted that with the growing concept of property, males started the insititution of family to protect and safeguard their property. This theory was a direct criticism of Morgan’s theory wherein the origin of family was ascribed to the bonding of mother- sib. Westermarck though an adherent follower of evolutionism went a bit too far while postulating the origin of monogamy as he traced it to the mammals and the birds.
- Morgan is rejected today largely because his theories cannot satisfactorily account for cultural variation. Why, for example, are some societies today lodged in “upper savagery” and others in “civilization.” The “psychic unity of mankind” or “germs of thought” that were postulated to account for parallel evolution cannot also account for cultural differences.