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

Steele was L. H. Morgan's first cousin, namely the daughter of his mother's brother. Feeley-Harnik (2001b, pp. 148–149) noted Steele's high level of religious education and detected a conflict between her ardent religiosity and L. H. Morgan's scientific vigor. Both Steele and MeIlvaine were concerned with the declining significance of religion and the necessity to strengthen and revive the original power of primitive Christianity. They saw that centuries of missionary work had depleted the vitality of Christians and made them susceptible to the dangers of miscegenation. In their eyes, L. H. Morgan with his kinship researches was a vehicle of Christian revivalism, for now it was possible to see the workings of the divine will in the material process of human moral evolution (cf., Feeley-Harnik, 2001b, p. 149). McIlvaine's view of human history as developing from promiscuity to monogamy may well have been a response to certain trends in American religious revivalism such as Cochranism and Mormonism that promoted sexual freedom, “spiritual wifery,” and polygamy. Alternatively L. H. Morgan, done with his youthful attachment to ancient Greek culture, was more and more interested in the natural and cultural delights offered by the new continent as well as in a new mode of thought coming from Europe and called “science.” L. H. Morgan turned his back to McIlvaine's discovery of cross-cousin marriage because he himself was married to his first cousin and also because he believed that the similarities between Dravidian and Iroquois kin terminologies signaled the Asiatic origin of American Indians.

In the meantime, L. H. Morgan's cousin, Nathaniel Morgan, was concerned with the declining significance of kinship in civilized societies, and he made his contribution to solidifying kinship ideology by compiling a genealogy of his Morgan lineage from the first Welsh settler in the New World, James Morgan (see N. Morgan, 1869). Initially, N. Morgan was dubious about L. H. Morgan belonging to their stock, but the founder of kinship studies “charged resolutely and gallantly through all my defences, turned my own ample store of gathered facts and circumstances fairly against myself, and succeeded, not only with convincing, but demonstrative evidence in establishing his clear right by lineal descent, to his present place in our family camp”