Bio: (1818-1881) American anthropologist and ethnologist. Lewis Henry Morgan studied law at Union College, where he graduated in 1840 and 1842 became a lawyer. In his later life, he becomes a politician and a businessman. He also joined the secret society called Grand Order of the Iroquois which sought to ensure equal and compassionate treatment of the Iroquois people. Morgan also served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for one year in 1880.

Morgan never worked in any scientific institution, but he used his wealth and connections to become one of the first and most eminent ethnologists and anthropologists in the US. On his first scientific endeavor in 1849–1850, Morgan collected, with the aid of his Indigenous collaborator Ely Parker, cultural information and around 500 artifacts related to ceremonies, clothing, tools, and housing of the Seneca Iroquois people. This data and artifacts were the basis for his first book League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851). The League of the Iroquois was a seventeenth-century political and military alliance and the confederacy of the Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, Oneida, Tuscarora, and Onondaga nations. The confederation was divided into six nations (tribes), each of them had two phratries consisting of four matrilineal exogamous clans, with clan mothers playing an important role in selecting chiefs. Clan longhouses served as communal dwellings and played a significant role in society.

Morgan, in the 1859–1862 period, with the help of Smithsonian institutions, embarked on new fieldwork, intending to collect information related to native American kinship systems. In addition to his own fieldwork, he sent questionnaires to government officials and missionaries throughout the world, so they could collect data concerning kinship systems from the countries where they worked. This research served as the basis of his book Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871). This book contained diagrams and data related to 200 kinship terminologies from all over the world. Morgan discovered that similar kinship terminology was used by native Americans who spoke different languages and had different historical and cultural backgrounds. In those languages same term that referred to father was used to designate father’s brother, and the same was the case for mother and mother’s sister. Using the fact that the same type of kinship terminology was used by Tamil people in southern India Morgan concluded that Native Americans originated in Asia.

Morgan divided kinship terminologies into classificatory and descriptive types. Classificatory languages have terms that represent many different types of relationships while descriptive terminology has terms that refer to only one type of relationship between people. Language of Seneca is an example of a language with classificatory kinship terminology.  This language also used one term for father and father’s brother, and one for mother and mother’s but it also had the same term for one’s sister and female parallel cousins, and another one for someone’s brother and male parallel cousins; while the terms for cross-cousins were different.

Morgan believed that in the history of humankind, there was moral evolution of marriages and family life, and that at a most primitive level existed total promiscuity, then came the consanguine family, after it the punualua family, followed by the patriarchal family, and finally, come the monogamous family. Different societies can be at different level at the same time, but all have to go through the same path. He also believed that a culture's current kinship classification, because they are naturally conservative, actually represents the type of marriage and family that previously existed in that culture. Classificatory kinship systems are thus ‘fossils’ or vestiges of the evolutionary stage of group marriage and sexual promiscuity, as it was impossible to distinguish between one’s father and father’s brother. With the advent of civilization and monogamous marriage descriptive classification developed, to clearly differentiate all family relations.

                                         Ancient Society

Based on his earlier writings, in the book Ancient Society (1877), Morgan developed the theory of universal stages of mankind’s biological and cultural evolution. He analyzed kinship systems, types of marriage, types of political organization, forms of property ownership, ideas (magic, religion, philosophy, and science), and technology, and their interdependence, to give a general account of the evolution of mankind. Morgan introduces the distinction between technological inventions, that follow the line of successive discoveries, on one hand, and cultural institutions, that ,,have been developed from primary germs of thought.“ Morgan focuses on seven areas of cultural institutions: 1) subsistence, 2) government, 3) language, 4) the family, 5) religion, 6) house life and architecture, and 7) property,  He delimits the stages according to technological criteria, that affected the development of other aspects of culture, but had the greatest impact on forms of subsistence. He suggested that societies went through three main stages of evolution – savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Stages of savagery and barbarism were each further divided into three successive stages or ‘ethnical periods’ (lower, middle, and higher). Although cultural evolution develops in parallel stages, it happens at varying paces in different societies and locations.

The lower level of savagery marks the start of the human race and culture, and there is no existing society at that level now. The middle level of savagery, of which Australian Aborigines are extent representative, starts with the use of fire, which leads to the development of language, common ownership of the property, and sexual promiscuity. The higher level of savagery starts with the invention of the bow and arrow, which led to the development of matrilineal family and matrilineal clan but the ownership of the property stayed communal. This level is represented by the Athabaskan people living in Canada.

Lower level of barbarism starts with the use of horticulture and pottery and those inventions lead to the start of the use of village settlements. On this level there is a certain degree of sexual equality; while marriage can be monogamous or polygamous, it is easily dissolved. the Iroquois represent this stage of cultural development. The middle level of barbarism is marked by the inventions of irrigation and the domestication of animals, which led to patriarchy, and the rise in inequality on all levels and the decline of communal ownership. On this level evolution of culture diverged in Eurasia and the Americas, due to the greater availability of animal protein in Eurasia. Morgan argues that higher intake of protein in some societies in Eurasia allowed for brain size to increase in Aryan and Semitic peoples, which enabled them to make greater technological progress. The invention of the plough, which happened only in Eurasia, marks the start of the level of higher barbarism.

The stage of civilization starts with the invention of writing and is also marked by the sharp rise of the importance of private property and the development of monogamous marriage and family. For Morgan, civil society is based on private property relations, and government based on the control of defined territory.

Main works

League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois (1851);

The American Beaver and His Works (1868);

Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871);

Ancient Society (1877);

Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines (1881).