Social Theorists
Lewis Henry Morgan
Anthropology
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Lewis Henry Morgan was an American anthropologist, social theorist and railroad lawyer, born in 1818 near Aurora, New York. He is recognized as a pioneer of the study of kinship systems, theorizing that the earliest human domestic institution was the matrilineal clan rather than the patriarchal family, and his comparative kinship analysis shaped what would become a central concern of the discipline. In Ancient Society (1877) he set out a theory of social evolution through three stages of savagery, barbarism and civilization, marked by successive technological advances, building on earlier work including Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) and The League of the Iroquois (1851), an ethnographic study of the Haudenosaunee. His ideas influenced Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud. He served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1880 and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He died in Rochester, New York, in 1881.
Facts
Birth YearSourced to the subject's own account Death YearSourced to the subject's own account BirthplaceSourced to the subject's own accountAurora, Cayuga County, New York 1 Death PlaceSourced to the subject's own account Defining ContributionSourced to the subject's own accountPioneer of kinship-systems analysis; theorized the matrilineal clan as the earliest human domestic institution 1 Notable WorkSourced to the subject's own account Cross-Tradition Connections
Practices Studied
Classificatory kinship terminology, in which relatives of the same generation and sex are grouped under a single term regardless of genealogical distance, is the foundational category Lewis Henry Morgan established in his comparative study of kinship systems worldwide.
The Crow kinship terminology system, named for the Crow people whose usage typifies it, is one of the six classificatory systems Lewis Henry Morgan defined.
Eskimo kinship terminology, which distinguishes the nuclear family by generation and sex while grouping other relatives together, is one of the six classificatory systems Lewis Henry Morgan defined and the system used in most of the English-speaking world today.
Hawaiian kinship terminology, which merges all relatives of the same generation and sex under a single term, is one of the six classificatory systems Lewis Henry Morgan defined in his 1871 comparative survey.
Iroquois kinship terminology, distinguishing parallel from cross relatives, is one of the six classificatory systems Lewis Henry Morgan defined and takes its name from his own fieldwork with the Iroquois Confederacy.
The Omaha kinship terminology system, the structural mirror of the Crow system under patrilineal rather than matrilineal descent, is one of the six classificatory systems Lewis Henry Morgan defined.
Sudanese kinship terminology, the most descriptively elaborate of the classificatory systems, assigning a distinct term to nearly every kin type, is one of the six systems Lewis Henry Morgan defined.
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