Lewis Henry Morgan

A classic, available again. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 1881) was trained as a lawyer, but in the second part of his life he focused his attention on the emerging science of ethnography. Covering areas of North and Central America, Morgan s last book, "Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines "was the first to regard a set of problems that is still currently debated: what does domestic architecture show anthropologists and archaeologists about social organization, and how does social organization combine with a system of production technology and ecological adjustment to influence domestic and public architecture? As William Longacre makes clear in the new introduction, the development of anthropological archaeology was profoundly affected by this book, and its impact continues to resonate. Demonstrating a lack of ethnocentrism rare for his day, Morgan gathered most of his own data from the field and from a gigantic correspondence. The result is a lively, readable work that is still fascinating and instructive today."

Modern anthropology would be radically different without this book. Published in 1871, this first major study of kinship, inventive and wide-ranging, created a new field of inquiry in anthropology. Drawing partly upon his own fieldwork among American Indians, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan examined the kinship systems of over one hundred cultures, probing for similarities and differences in their organization. In his attempt to discover particular types of marriage and descent systems across the globe, Morgan demonstrated the centrality of kinship relations in many cultures. Kinship, it was revealed, was an important key for understanding cultures and could be studied through systematic, scientific means. Anthropologists continue to wrestle with the premises, methodology, and conclusions of Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity. Scholars such as W. H. R. Rivers, Robert Lowie, Meyer Fortes, Fred Eggan, and Claude Lévi-Strauss have acknowledged their intellectual debt to this study; those less sympathetic to Morgan's treatment of kinship nonetheless do not question its historical significance and impact on the development of modern anthropology.