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

that fascinated European philosophers since the Renaissance era. Both Trautmann and Feeley-Harnik insightfully detect a connection between science and religion in L. H. Morgan's life (mainly through the medium of his close friend, Rev. McIlvaine), but they do not go as far as placing L. H. Morgan's interest in kinship in a broader context of the transformation of Christian practice in Europe and the United States.

The 19th century, the age of scientific discoveries and inventions, generated a whole nest of explorations into the phenomenon of relationality coherent in their underlying objective to unearth the logic behind the continuity, reproduction and transmission of life-forms. L. H. Morgan's life and works profoundly express the interdisciplinary complexity and existential significance of the phenomenon of kinship. Kinship studies were begotten in the atmosphere of severe existential constraints. L. H. Morgan's family came to occupy the lands once belonging to a dwindling minority. Young L. H. Morgan dressed like an Iroquois and co-opted his peers into a new “order of the Iroquois,” while the Iroquois used to dress like local animals and assume animal names as the titles of their clans. As a lawyer, L. H. Morgan defended the Native Americans' right to their lands and they adopted him into their ranks. L. H. Morgan lost his father when he was a child and his two daughters when they were still children. He began his research and community-building in the memory of his father, and he ended up blaming the death of his daughters on his agitated book writing. He was married to his first cousin. His wife and best friend were deeply religious, while he himself was zealously scientific. An evolutionary model firmly associated in the history of science with his name originated in the mind of his Presbyterian minister friend, while his own ideas about geology, animal psychology, totemism, and national consciousness put Darwinism on its head but have remained largely hidden from the public eye. Finally, he self-consciously belonged to a specific Morgan lineage whose profile was identified in all details by his remote cousin. L. H. Morgan's “bounded rationality,” therefore, mysteriously mirrored and serendipitously fed into his unswerving focus on human kinship.