| Chapter 1: | The Invention of Lewis H. Morgan and the Genesis of Kinship |
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of his personal investment in the matters of consanguinity, family genealogy, affinity, death, religion, Indian antiquities, and American nationalism has until recently remained virtually unknown. Seminal out-of-archives contributions to the deciphering of the mystery behind the “father” of American anthropology have been made by Trautmann (1987), Carnes (1989), Deloria (1998), and Feeley-Harnik (1999, 2001a, 2001b).
Born in upstate New York, Lewis Henry Morgan lost his father, Jedediah Morgan, at the age of 8 and was raised by his mother and older sister. Even in his middle age, he believed that a “child is never ready to part with a parent” (Carnes, 1988, p. 96). Later, the adult L. H. Morgan would advance a famous hypothesis, which proposed that the primitive systems of kinship classification—as exemplified by the Iroquois American Indians, which involve the classification of father with the father's brother—were geared to an ancient state of sexual promiscuity in which the biological father of the child was unknown. J. Morgan was Worshipful Master of the Scipio Masonic lodge and High Priest of the Aurora chapter of the Royal Arch Masons. As a young man, L. H. Morgan attempted to regenerate the paternal bonds by continuing his father's involvement in Masonic activities. He presided over a fraternity called “The Gordian Knot” that was devoted to the study of Greek antiquities. Feeling the disconnect between ancient Greece and modern America, L. H. Morgan soon renamed the fraternity the “Grand Order of the Iroquois” and directed its activities toward research into Native American antiquities, ethnic cross-dressing (“cultural transvestism,” or “ethnic drag”), and the reenactment of Indian rituals. In so doing, L. H. Morgan adopted the Iroquois as the ancestors of white Americans and gave the nascent American national consciousness a Native American pedigree (Deloria, 1998). The initiate into the Grand Order of the Iroquois went through the ritual of “Inindianation”; he was conceived of as a “captive,” who had wandered so long among the palefaces that he had “lost nearly every trace of his parentage and descent” (Carnes, 1989, pp. 96–97).
One day L. H. Morgan befriended an acculturated Iroquois, Ely S. Parker, whom he had met at a local bookstore. Parker became his