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

Chapter 1

The Invention
of Lewis H. Morgan
and the Genesis of Kinship

In anthropological textbooks, the inception of kinship research is invariably attributed to Lewis H. Morgan, the author of Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) and several earlier reports (see L. H. Morgan, 1847a, 1858, 1859, 1860a, 1868b). In Europe, L. H. Morgan's works were received coldly. In the United States, L. H. Morgan found a devoted follower, John W. Powell, the head of the Bureau of Ethnology. Powell published several short articles on kinship, mainly popularizing L. H. Morgan's findings (see Powell, 1884a, 1884b, 1884c, 1885), and an appreciation of L. H. Morgan's contributions to ethnology (Powell, 1881). For a long time, L. H. Morgan's significance for anthropology was assessed on the basis of his narrowly ethnological monographs. Consequently, he became an “evolutionist” par exellence. The full scope of his intellectual engagement with anthropology, linguistics, law, geology, and animal psychology was left under-appreciated. In addition, the complexity