Engagement, Ethnographie und Gesellschaftstheorie

Das Vermächtnis von Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881)

Abstract

German anthropology has little more than mockery in store for the founder of our discipline, since in this country evolutionary theories and kinship studies have always been considered eccentric pastimes of academic misfits. In a wider review, I will introduce Lewis Henry Morgan as a life-long activist for the rights of native Americans and of women. In an age of armchair scholars, he grew close to the people he described and viewed ethnography as a joint effort by the outsider and his Amerindian consultants. Exclusively based upon Thomas R. Trautmann’s magnificent research, I will also report Morgan’s creative crisis in 1865, when, after completing “Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family”, he had to revise this masterpiece, because a ‘long’ chronology had swept away old concepts of human history. Regarding the criteria of Morgan’s c l a s s i f i c a t o r y  s y s t e m, I differ from Trautmann and dispute his rejection of Morgan’s major theses in “Systems” by turning to the dimension of affinal prescription, even though our academic ancestor was not familiar with this perspective. Throughout the article I try to caution against the dictates of academic trends.