The Genius of Kinship: The Phenomenon of Human Kinship and the G ...

promising hypotheses. It is now universally acknowledged that the brain is the organ of the mind and that it is divided into areas with specialized functions (see P. A. Erickson, 1977; Jerison, 1977). Phrenologists' hypothesis regarding the innateness of mental qualities, and the genealogical continuities between human brains, remains controversial but it has enjoyed popularity with more reputable scientific schools and disciplines. Its interpretative excesses, most importantly its belief in a linear correlation between the shape and size of the skull and individual mental abilities, were comparable to Freud's and some of his literal readers) inference of the workings of a perverted libido from any aspect of dream, art, folklore, or literature. L. H. Morgan's and McIlvaine's attempts to “divine” human history on the basis of kinship terminologies were also naïve. Although it is true that the endocast of a human skull carries an imprint of the brain, phrenologists' infatuation with lumps on the skull was irrational and unscientific.

One can observe a peculiar cross-over between L. H. Morgan and phrenologists. Many linguists tend to view language as a function of the brain, while many biologists will say that race is a “distinct evolutionary lineage within a species” (Templeton, 1998); in other words, the function of the blood.² Had L. H. Morgan related kinship terminologies to the brain, rather than to the blood, he would have avoided most of the critique and confusion that ensued after the publication of Systems, and prefigured later cognitive approaches to kinship terminologies. L. H. Morgan could also conceive of kinship terms not as categories linked to form an egocentric genealogical chart (I have a father who has a brother, etc.), but as traits forming an individual's social phenotype (X is a father to A, brother to B, grandfather to C, etc.) and changing from generation to generation. This would have solved the problem of a misfit between immutable biological kinship and the empirical variety of forms of kin classification. Alternatively, had phrenologists related the shape and size of skulls to the morally neutral morphological fluctuations across time and space, and mental phenomena to language, they would have lived up to the standards of a proper science.