Lewis Henry Morgan

Lewis Henry Morgan, an American lawyer, studied, lived with, and was eventually adopted by the Iroquois Indians in New York State; this experience made him a self-taught anthropologist who went on to make substantial contributions to the field. His evolutionary theory of the family has been largely abandoned, but his Ancient Society (1877) became a classic in Marxist literature. Its account of how culture had actually evolved was the best available during the mid-nineteenth century. Although Karl Marx (see also Vol. 4) died before he was able to write a planned book about Morgan, Friedrich Engels (see also Vol. 4) wrote The Origin of the Family: Private Property and the State in 1884 largely on the basis of Morgan's work. Morgan was also the first to publish a treatise on Australian kinship.