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Information about Lewis H. Morgan

This article is about the American ethnologist, anthropologist and writer. For the U.S. Representative from Louisiana, see Lewis L. Morgan.


Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881) was an American ethnologist, anthropologist and writer. However, his professional life was in the field of law. As an amateur scholar, he is 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 local group, 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 is a prestigious annual lecture memorializing Morgan given each year at the Anthropology Department of the University of Rochester.

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Lewis Lovering Morgan (March 2, 1876 - June 10, 1950) was a Louisiana attorney and politician who served in the United States House of Representatives from November 5, 1912, to March 4, 1917, from the Sixth Congressional District, which then included part of the New Orleans area.
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Ethnology (from the Greek ethnos, meaning "people") is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyses the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the racial or national divisions of humanity.
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Anthropology (from Greek: ἄνθρωπος, anthropos, "human being"; and λόγος, logos, "speech" lit. to talk about human beings) is the study of humanity.
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LAW may refer to:
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Sociocultural evolution(ism) is an umbrella term for theories of cultural evolution and social evolution, describing how cultures and societies have developed over time.
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American Indian and Alaska Native
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Union College of Schenectady, New York, is a non-denominational, independent, selective liberal arts college in New York's Capital District. It was chartered in 1795, though the college can trace its beginnings to 1779.
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National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine."

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American Indian and Alaska Native
One race: 2.5 million[1]
In combination with one or more other races: 1.6 million[2]
Regions with significant populations  United States

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Seneca is a group of indigenous people native to North America. They are the westernmost Nation within the Six Nations or Iroquois League. While unknown for sure, approximately 15,000 to 25,000 Seneca live in the United States and Canada, on and off reservations around Buffalo, in
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Ely Samuel Parker (1828 – August 31, 1895), (born Hasanoanda, later known as Donehogawa) was an Iroquois of the Seneca tribe born at Indian Falls, New York (then part of the Tonawanda Reservation).
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125,000
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45,000 in Canada)
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Ethnography (ἔθνος ethnos = people and γράφειν graphein
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Kinship is one of the most basic principles for organizing individuals into social groups, roles, and categories. It was originally thought to reflect biological descent, a view that was challenged by David M.
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Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher; prominent classical liberal political theorist; and sociological theorist.

Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world,
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Sir Edward Burnett Tylor (October 2 1832–January 2 1917), was an English anthropologist.

Tylor is considered representative of cultural evolutionism. In his works Primitive culture and Anthropology
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Social evolution is a subdiscipline of evolutionary biology that is concerned with social behaviours, i.e. those that have fitness consequences for individuals other than the actor.
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