| Chapter 1: | The Invention of Lewis H. Morgan and the Genesis of Kinship |
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guide into the life of real Iroquois, and a collaborator on his project of authoring the first scientific description of an American Indian tribe. The Iroquois extended their kinship to L. H. Morgan, making him an adopted member of the Turtle clan of the Seneca nation. L. H. Morgan was thoroughly impressed by the cultural saliency and political effectiveness of kinship ties among the Iroquois (L. H. Morgan, 1847b, p. 178). He came to recognize that the ties of kinship were an invariant of human life, compatible with any level of societal complexity.
Along with rubbing shoulders with an Iroquois, L. H. Morgan also sustained a friendship with a wholly different sort of man, the minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Rochester, Joshua H. McIlvaine. A student of Sanskrit, a member of the American Oriental Society, and a professor of Belles-lettres at Princeton University (at that time, the College of New Jersey), McIlvaine influenced L. H. Morgan in his philological, theological, and evolutionary interests and recommended the manuscript of The Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family for publication. In fact, as Trautmann (1984, 1987) showed, it was the minister who proposed the explanation of the forms of kinship as deriving from the evolution of the forms of marriage from primitive promiscuity to monogamy. McIlvaine also discovered the rule of cross-cousin marriage among the Tamil, which he thought was an intermediary form between the two poles of matrimonial evolution. This rule was absent among L. H. Morgan's Iroquois, which created certain differences between Tamil and Iroquois kin classifications. While McIlvaine was hardwired to study moral evolution by his Christian beliefs, L. H. Morgan was originally more prepared to see the diversity of kin terminologies as a function of population history rather than developmental stages. The worldwide networks of kin terms reminded him more of the networks of beaver huts spread across North America.
At the time of L. H. Morgan's invention of kinship, Protestant theology and practice in America was undergoing a major shift known as the Second Great Awakening. New Christian enthusiasm emanated from McIlvaine, on the one hand, and Morgan's own wife, Mary Elizabeth Steele, on the other. L. H. Morgan married Steele in 1851, but they had known each other since they were children, for