Kinship and the Social Order

The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan

Meyer Fortes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351510035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the world's most eminent social anthropologists draws upon his many years of study and research in the field of kinship and social organization to review the development of anthropological theory and method from Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) to anthropologists of the 1960s. It is the central argument of this book that the structuralist theory and method developed by British and American anthropologists in the study of kinship and social organization is the direct descendant of Morgan's researches. The volume starts with a re-examination of Morgan's work. Professor Fortes demonstrates how a tradition of misinterpretation has disguised the true import of Morgan's discoveries. He follows with a detailed analysis of the work of Rivers and Radcliffe-Brown and the generation of anthropologists inspired by them. The author states his own point of view as it has developed in the framework of modern structuralist theory, with ethnographic examples examined in depth. He shows that the social relations and institutions conventionally grouped under the rubric of kinship and social organization belong simultaneously to two complementary domains of social structure, the familial and the political. Meyer Fortes' contribution to the field of anthropology can best be understood in the context of balance of forces between these domains of the personal and public. In the latter part of the book, he gives detailed attention to the principal conceptual issues that have confronted research and theory in the study of kinship and social organizations since Morgan's time. He shows that kinship institutions are autonomous, not mere by-products of economic requirements, and demonstrates the moral base of kinship in the rule of amity.

Part I

Retrospect

CHAPTER I

Morgan: The Founding Father

I

LEWIS HENRY MORGAN’S SCHOLARLY INTERESTS, LIKE HIS PARTICIPATION IN PUBLIC affairs, had a wide range, but in this book I confine myself to his achievements as an ethnologist and his enduring intellectual legacy to us, his posterity in the discipline he helped to found.

History, we are often warned, is a fickle jade. Morgan was by all accounts as robust and uncompromising an American of his day as could have been found anywhere in the United States. Yet his ideas and discoveries, revolutionary as they were for the science of man, suffered eclipse in his own country at a critical time. Like the proverbial prophet, his following was greater outside than within his native land at that time. Nevertheless, you might well ask what special claims a British anthropologist could have to merit the honor of giving the first of these lecture courses dedicated to his memory.

It is due, I am sure, to a turn curious in the history of our discipline. It was a British anthropologist, W. H. R. Rivers, as all students of the subject know, whose rediscovery of Morgan restored him to his rightful place in the main stream of anthropological scholarship—and this was the beginning of a method and theory of research which took deep root in British anthropology. Our science is by its very nature incapable of existing as an insular study. Morgan’s observations and theories excited worldwide ethnological interest in his own lifetime, but leading authorities in the United States soon turned away from him, perhaps not without justification. For what chiefly attracted attention about his work was what we now know to be its ephemeral facade. His fundamental discoveries were either ignored or misunderstood. Then came their vindication by Rivers, and the discipline thus founded now stands at the center of anthropological science.

I am going to argue that the primary source of what is nowadays called structural theory in the study of kinship and social organization is to be found in Morgan’s work, and this not only in the purely historical sense but also, and more significantly, in the conceptual sense. This is true almost in spite of Morgan himself. For one of the curious and instructive features of this story is that he himself overemphasized what eventually proved to be of merely incidental importance in his work, thus failing to make the most of what eventually proved to be his discoveries of lasting value.

I am concerned then with the emergence and growth of a discipline in the science of anthropology. “An academic discipline,” says Robert Redfield, in one of those dazzling papers in which he blazed many a trail, “an academic discipline is at once a group of men in persisting social relations and a method of investigation” (1953 : 728). Spelled out, his dictum applies to any autonomous branch of art or science or scholarship. It is marked, firstly, by the craft or skill or body of knowledge that is distinctive of it. But if it is a living activity, it can be equally well identified by the manner in which its practitioners are set apart from the laity, by which I mean all the rest of the world as far as the practitioners are concerned. They will have an organization that is exclusive, institutions that are peculiar to their community as a profession, distinctive customs and norms. In short a specific culture. This is how they appear to the outsider. He knows that they are different because he is unable to comprehend the idiosyncrasies of their activity even if he can to some extent appreciate the products of their labors.

But how do the insiders, the practitioners, represent the autonomy of their craft and their calling to themselves ? How do they perceive their collective identity, as opposed to the uninitiated laity ? As anthropologists, we know where to look for the answer. We may expect to find it crystallized in myth and pedigree and accounted for by tradition—that is the process of handing on from generation to generation. And we shall not be surprised to find this sense of in-group identity symbolized in figures of ancestors and heroes and their opponents, the false prophets and factionmongers.

II

I first heard of Lewis H. Morgan as one of these false prophets. It was in Malinowski’s seminars in 1931. Morgan was presented to us as a regrettable example of deluded genius, personifying the Reign of Error in anthropology which functionalism had come to overthrow. He stood for many of the things that were anathema to Malinowski’s view of human social life—the discredited and repugnant hypothesis of primitive promiscuity and group marriage, the preposterous scheme of stages of social evolution, the dreary addiction to kinship terminologies as an end in itself. Rivers was Malinowski’s bête noire and Morgan loomed behind him as the misguided inventor of primitive communism in women and in property and as the inspiration of his misleading emphasis on forms of marriage as the main causal factors in kinship institutions. Morgan’s canonization, as Lowie has called it, by Marx and Engels, and the blind adherence of Marxists ever since to his theories was a further black mark. If it was not his fault, it was added evidence of the wrongheadedness and sterility of his ideas. The touchstone was elementary: Morgan’s theories were all wild conjecture. They collapsed in the face of the ethnographic facts and of functionalist criticism. Lowie, who was more respected than admired by Malinowski, received praise for refuting Morgan’s reconstruction of the origin of the clan, while Westermarck, hero of Malinowski’s apprentice days, was held up for special honor because he had so early demolished the dogma of group marriage.¹ At that point, then, Lewis H. Morgan was to me, and I suspect to all of Malinowski’s pupils, one of the leading anti-heroes of our discipline. His theories, his methods, his whole approach, represented in starkest shape tendencies to which the new movement in social anthropology was most antipathetic.

III

I confess with shame that it was not till nearly a decade later that I first read Morgan’s works with an open mind. My own field experience, illuminated by Evans-Pritchard’s studies of Nuer lineage organization, had forced me to come to grips with kinship and descent theory. Happily for me, Radcliffe-Brown was there to show the way. He was critical of Morgan, indeed more so than Malinowski or most of Morgan’s other critics, for the simple reason that he understood what Morgan was trying to do. He made a present to me, when he was disposing of his library, of the copy of Ancient Society (1877) which he had acquired as a student at Cambridge University in 1906. And one need only turn the pages and note the passages he marked to realize how closely he had read it and how he had penetrated to what was fundamental in Morgan’s work.²

Coming to Morgan then, and reading him side by side with the works of his contemporaries and successors, put his contributions to the development of anthropology in a new light for me. I was reminded of this recently when reading an essay by Kroeber. In this paper Kroeber looks back from 1950, over the half-century since the official establishment of anthropology at the University of California. He divides the history of our subject into two major periods. He calls the first period “unorganized” and measures it from Herodotus, our quasi-mythological founding ancestor. This period ends, he says, with the revolutionary decade of the 186o’s. Then began what he calls the “organized” portion of our history. It was, as he observes, the phenomenal decade which started with Maine’s Ancient Law (1861) and Bachofen’s Das Mutterrecht (1861) and ended with Morgan’s Systems (1870) and Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871). Not only that, for Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871) appeared at the beginning and the end respectively of this intellectual explosion. It did not matter, Kroeber comments with characteristic wisdom, if the views held were right or wrong. “What did matter,” he concludes, “was that there was a direction, an attitude, a notion of method, above all a set of problems” (1952: 144–45).

In retrospect, then, if we follow Kroeber (and other authorities support him) we see Morgan not as a false prophet but as one of the inspired band of midnineteenth-century pioneers who brought order and method into the studies that are now distinctive of our calling, where previously random speculation and casual curiosity had been the rule.

How does Morgan appear today in this light ? To judge of this we must note, first of all, the controversies that blazed up at once around and among these innovators. Morgan in particular drew plenty of fire. In fact, he became one of the central figures in a debate that went on for half a century. But I must not linger over details of this, pregnant though it was for the future of our science. Morgan’s contributions to this great movement of thought have been amply described in biographical and historical studies of his life and work, notably through the devoted scholarship of Leslie White. What we must remember is that the issues were not just academic in nature. The very foundations of the nineteenth-century conception of humanity were at stake. No wonder that passions flew high and that the most eminent scholars and scientists were engaged.

What chiefly aroused Morgan’s contemporaries was his radical and grandiose vision of the origins and development of mankind’s basic social institutions. I call it a vision rather than a theory for one cannot read his works, even from the sober perspective of modern anthropology and archeology, without being swept along by the ardor and enthusiasm that suffused them. Here is learning enough but it is not the dry erudition and the studied aloofness of Tylor. Nor is it the persuasive accumulation of detail that we find at the other extreme in Darwin. Nor is Morgan even in his most rhetorical and involved arguments carried away by the poetical licence of which Starcke (1889 : chap. VII) accused Bachofen. Morgan often refers to his hypotheses as “conjectures.” But when he presents them he does so in the spirit of a man who has made—to quote a favorite word of his—“stupendous” discoveries:

… like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken.

So he had, as was in due course recognized.

But what loomed foremost for him, and for his contemporaries, was not these discoveries, but as I have said, the extravagant vision of the development of human society which he derived from them. Historians of our science have shown how this came about. The Zeitgeist demanded it. Darwin wrote The Descent of Man to demonstrate that man “like every other species is descended from pre-existing forms” and in order to refute those by whom “it had often and confidently been asserted that man’s origins can never be known.” Morgan’s theme was as urgent for him, and as momentous, in his estimation, for the work of fashioning the new conception of mankind that was to replace “The theory of human degradation to explain the existence of savages and barbarians,” which came in “as a corollary from the Mosaic cosmogony” (1877; 1878 ed.: 4–5). He set out, we remember, to show that “the history of the human race is one in source, one in experience and one in progress” (ibid. : vi), that it was created by a “common principle of intelligence” (ibid. : 533) and culminated in Civilization with all its promise for ages to come. He spoke for his time—and a De Tocqueville of the period would, no doubt, have added tartly, for his country’s social philosophy too. And that was why it was his large generalizations, rather than the empirical and scholarly investigations with which he believed he was merely underpinning them, that caught most attention.

We must bear in mind, as his biographers have emphasized (Stern, 1931), that the hypothesis which he took over and built upon in elaborating what to us is his preposterous scheme of social stages, was widely current at the time.³ Eminent scholars in Europe and America, as well as men of affairs, took for granted the notion of development by stages in the growth of society. Many, moreover, accepted in some shape or another, the assumption of a primordial stage of marital communalism coupled with matriarchy as the terminus a quo of the history of the human family.

In relation to this frame of thought, and more particularly to the nature and paucity of the observational data that could be drawn upon, Morgan’s contribution was sensational. The criticism that broke loose, even from some who were broadly in agreement with his ideas testified to this. The story has been well told by others,⁴ but what I wish to underline is that the focus of attention was then, and so remained for fifty years, Morgan’s speculative hypotheses. The glaring fallacies in his reasoning and the shaky foundations of his conjectures were easily exposed. Darwin, arguing from the analogy of sexual selection and mating habits among the lower primates, was one of the first to express reservations amounting to a rejection of the promiscuity and group marriage hypothesis (1871: vol. II, 358–63). But even he couched his objections in terms of deference to the prevailing ethnological opinion of his day. When in 1891 Westermarck stepped into the arena with his History of Human Marriage, it was with the primary, if not sole purpose of disproving the doctrine of original group marriage and its implications.

On the other hand, as others have recorded (Stern, 1931; Lowie, 1936; Tax, 1937; White, 1948), Morgan’s speculative theories had partisans too. I am thinking not only of their adoption by Marx and Engels as the gospel source for their theory of the origin of the family and the state, nor of the cordiality of Maine or the enthusiasm of Bachofen (cf. Stern, 1931: 145 ff.). I have in mind rather such (from our point of view) more respectable and influential support as these views received from people like Lord Avebury (1870) and from Sir James Frazer even as late as 1910.

IV

To realize what this means in relation to our own times, let us remember that it was in the early 1900s that Malinowski fell under the spell of The Golden Bough (1890–1915) and that Radcliffe-Brown wrote the first draft of The Andaman Islanders (published 1922). By this time Boas was the unquestioned leader of American anthropology, Kroeber was already vigorously pursuing research, and Lowie was serving his apprenticeship with Wissler (cf. Lowie, 1959: chap. 2). We are by this date on the threshold of today, linked to Morgan by a brief intellectual pedigree, and by a tradition which is as green as that which binds us to our own parents and grandparents. Since then, the theory of primitive promiscuity and group marriage—outside the U.S.S.R. and apart from such Marxist scholars as Professor George Thomson (1949)—has been liquidated, helped by a strong push from Malinowksi with his study of the Australian family (1913). More significantly, the seemingly endless matriarchy controversy has been pulled down from the realm of inspired guesswork to the solid earth of ethnographical field research.⁵

It is this, particularly, that marks the big change since Morgan’s lifetime in the direction and organization of anthropological research to which Kroeber referred. True, the main currents of ethnographical research in the first decade of this century, especially in the United States under Boas’s influence (cf. White, 1948), moved strongly away from the beacon set up by Morgan ; but his presence never ceased to be felt and soon it was authoritatively recognized. The League of the Iroquois (1851)⁶ influenced ethnographic field research in America before Morgan became internationally known.

But what was more to the point was the recognition of Morgan as a discoverer, one not unworthy to be ranked with a discoverer of a new planet. And it is this that marked the real break between the period of anthropological history inaugurated by Morgan and its earlier, amorphous anticipations; from this stemmed the shift in method and direction to which Kroeber drew attention.

By discovery I mean bringing to light previously uncomprehended or totally unknown facts and principles—in this context, facts and principles relating to human social life. What was significant for Morgan and critical for the subsequent development of anthropology was that his discoveries were made by direct observation in the field. Nor did he stop there. He added the necessary complement of theoretical interpretations which could be verified or falsified by recourse to further direct observation. This is something quite different from the reliance on speculation and conjecture which had prevailed before and which still held sway among the leading ethnologists of the day.

V

Morgan’s greatest discovery, as every anthropologist knows, and as has often been stressed, was, in Leslie White’s words, “the fact that customs of designating relatives have scientific significance.” (1957: 257). Stated so modestly, its momentous importance would not be apparent to the layman. To us as anthropologists whose work it is to seek knowledge of the springs of man’s social life, it has a clarion ring, for we know that it was from this discovery that some of the most far-reaching explorations of our subject matter first took their impetus. With all due respect to the memory of Malinowski, honor must be given in particular, as I have already suggested, to W. H. R. Rivers. He was, as Sol Tax reminded Radcliffe-Brown’s followers “the founder of the modern study of social organization” (1955: 471). It is surely relevant that Rivers came to this study, as Morgan did, through direct observation in the field. In this lay the stimulus which led him to acclaim, to his everlasting credit, “the great theoretical importance” of what he described as Morgan’s “new discovery” (1914a: 5).

We should remember that Morgan’s analysis of classificatory kinship systems had been ignored for thirty years as the result mainly of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• AldineTransaction Introduction, Lionel Tiger
• Foreword, Alfred Harris
• Preface
• Part I Retrospect
• Part Two Paradigmatic Ethnographical Specimens
• Part III Some Issues in Structural Theory
• Bibliography
• Index