Lewis H. Morgan

Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881) is considered to be the "Father of American anthropology," although his professional life was in the field of law. He was an amateur scholar best known for his work on cultural evolution and Native Americans. November 21 is the 325th day of the year (326th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1818 is a common year starting on Thursday. ... December 17 is the 351st day of the year (352nd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar. ... 1881 was a common year starting on Saturday (see link for calendar). ... Law (a loanword from Old Norse lag), in politics and jurisprudence, is a set of rules or norms of conduct which mandate, proscribe or permit specified relationships among people and organizations, provide methods for ensuring the impartial treatment of such people, and provide punishments for those who do not follow... Cultural evolution is the structural change of a society and its values over time. ... Native Americans (also Indians, Aboriginal Peoples, American Indians, First Nations, Alaskan Natives, Amerindians, or Indigenous Peoples of America) are the indigenous inhabitants of The Americas prior to the European colonization, and their modern descendants. ...

Born in rural Rochester, he studied law at Union College in 1840 and began practicing in his home town of Aurora, New York as well as Rochester. There is also a Rochester in Ulster County, New York; for that town see Rochester, Ulster County, New York. ... This article is about the college in New York; there are also Union Colleges in Barbourville, Kentucky and Lincoln, Nebraska and a Union University in Jackson, Tennessee. ... 1840 is a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will take you to calendar). ... Aurora is the name of some places in the U.S. state of New York: Aurora, Cayuga County, New York (a village) Aurora, Erie County, New York (a town) For other uses or locations with this name, see Aurora. ...

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 adopted member of the Iroquois tribe with the name Tayadaowuhkuh, meaning bridging the gap (between the Iroquois and the whites).-1... The Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee, also known as the League of Peace and Power) is a group of First Nations/Native Americans. ... Caucasian is originally a geographical term, meaning relative or pertaining to the Caucasus region of Eastern Europe and West Asia. ...

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 (1886) 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. The Seneca Tribe, or Onodowohgah (People of the Hill Top), traditionally lived in New York State between the Genesee River and Canandaigua Lake. ... Ely Samuel Parker (1828 - August 31, 1895), Hasanoanda, was an Iroquois of the Seneca tribe born at Indian Falls, New York (then part of the Tonawanda Reservation). ... The Iroquois Confederacy (Haudenosaunee, also known as the League of Peace and Power) is a group of First Nations/Native Americans. ... Ethnography (from the Greek ethnos = nation and graphein = writing) refers to the qualitative description of human social phenomena, based on months or years of fieldwork. ... Kinship is a biological and/or familial relationship between two organisms. ...

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. The New York Legislature is the legislative branch of the U.S. state of New York, seated at the states capital, Albany. ... The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an organization that promotes cooperation between scientists, defends scientific freedom, encourages scientific responsibility and supports scientific education for the betterment of all humanity. ... 1879 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... The 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. ...

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 evoluton, 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 civilisation era. Thus Morgan introduced a link between the social progress and technological progress. Morgan viewed the technological progress as a force behinds the social progress, and any social change - in social institutions, organisations or ideologies have their begining in the change of technology. His theory became an important milestone in the development of social darwinism. Herbert Spencer. ... Edward Burnett Tylor. ... Cultural evolution is the structural development (change) of a society over time. ... Savage has various meanings. ... A barbarism is a word or expression that is not standard in a language. ... A civilization or civilisation has a variety of meanings related to human society. ... A large bonfire Fire is a form of combustion. ... The word bow has several meanings and two pronunciations, depending on meaning: Rhymes with low A kind of weapon; see bow (weapon). ... A man shapes pottery as it turns on a wheel. ... Domesticated animals, plants, and other organisms are those whose collective behavior, life cycle, or physiology has been altered as a result of their breeding and living conditions being under human control for multiple generations. ... Metalworking is the craft and practice of working with metals to create parts or structures. ... An alphabet is a complete standardized set of letters — basic written symbols — each of which roughly represents a phoneme of a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it may have been in the past. ... Writing may refer to two activities: the inscribing characters on a medium, with the intention of forming words and other lingual constructs that represent language and record information, or the creation of information to be conveyed through written language. ... Social progress is defined as a progress of society, which makes this society better. ... Origins of theory According to Czech philosopher Radovan Richta, in his 1967 publication “Man and Technology in the Revolution of Our Day”, technology (which he defines as “a material entity created by the application of mental and physical effort to nature in order to achieve some value”) evolves in three... Social change refers to acts of advocacy for the cause of changing society in a positive way. ... A social institution is any institution in a socity that works to socialize the groups or people in it. ... Social Darwinism is a social theory which holds that Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection is not only a model for the development of biological traits in a population, but can also be applied to human social institutions. ...

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 Morgan's evolutionary position is widely discredited and unilinear theories of evolution are not highly regarded. However, many anthropologists recognize that he was one of the first people to systematically study kinship systems and there is a prestiguous annual lecture memorializing Morgan given each year at the Anthropology Department of the University of Rochester. Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 Trier, Germany – March 14, 1883 London, UK) was an influential German philosopher, political economist, and revolutionary organizer of the International Workingmens Association, whose two books in particular, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto (the latter with Friedrich Engels), laid the foundations... Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels (November 28, 1820–August 5, 1895) was a 19th-century German political philosopher. ... Marxism is the political practice and social theory based on the works of Karl Marx, a 19th century philosopher, economist, journalist, and revolutionary, along with Friedrich Engels. ... Leslie Alvin White ([19 January [1900]], Salida Colorado -- 31 March 1975) was an anthropologist known for his advocacy of theories of cultural evolution and his role in creating the department of anthropology at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. ... Franz Boas Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 22, 1942) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the Father of American Anthropology. Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. ... Kinship is a biological and/or familial relationship between two organisms. ... Located in Rochester, New York and founded in 1850, the University of Rochester is a private, coeducational and nonsectarian research institution. ...

External links

• Ancient Society By Lewis H. Morgan (complete text online)