| Chapter 1: | The Invention of Lewis H. Morgan and the Genesis of Kinship |
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(N. Morgan, 1869, p. 179). By the time of the dispute, L. H. Morgan had just submitted his book to the Smithsonian Institution Press.
The founder of kinship studies dedicated his magnum opus to his two daughters, Mary and Helen Morgan, who both died of scarlet fever in 1862. A bereaved L. H. Morgan felt that it was the writing of the book that had took his attention away from the health needs of his children. His daughters were his co-authors in writing the blood-filled history of “human families,” and the book was his father's solemn offering on their tomb. L. H. Morgan designed his daughters' stone coffins as well as the family mausoleum. He knew that intelligent communication is deeper and older than human speech; hence, he believed that his daughters' spirits stayed in touch with him. Although Spiritualism was gaining momentum in the state of New York, L. H. Morgan had his own religion to follow. In accordance with the intimate ethics of his Iroquois friends, all of L. H. Morgan's books were dedicated to close friends and family, suggesting that the books were part and parcel of the author's system of relationships (Feeley-Harnik, 1999, pp. 253–254).
While Trautmann, Feeley-Harnik, and Deloria have unearthed a wealth of relevant information on the complex knot involving life and science in the phenomenon of L. H. Morgan, they stopped short of elucidating all the facets of the Zeitgeist that invented L. H. Morgan himself. For instance, Trautmann's analysis implies that the discovery of the Iroquois system of kinship naturally led to the invention of kinship as a generic subject matter. The simple evolution from empirical observation to theory leaves out the origin of a necessity, by which kinship was constructed as an object of knowledge. Trautmann overlooks the existence of a broader trend in the social and natural sciences toward relational accounts of their subject matters. Paying due heed to the influence of historical linguistics on L. H. Morgan's kinship project, Trautmann does not see the connection between the idea of linguistic kinship as such, as pioneered by Franz Bopp, August Pott, and others in Germany, and the idea of human kinship as introduced by L. H. Morgan. Another overlooked source of L. H. Morgan's kinship studies is the phenomenon of genius