Dravidian Kinship and the Anthropology of Lewis Henry Morgan

Abstract

KINSHIP AS AN OBJECT of scholarly discourse is thought of, rightly, as the special province of anthropology, and the invention of kinship in the 1860's and 1870's is effectively the invention of anthropology itself, in the form we know it. Kinship's inventors include Bachofen, Maine, Fustel de Coulanges and McLennan;' but the decisive contribution is that of Lewis Henry Morgan. Morgan, a successful railroad lawyer of Rochester, New York, is well known for his Iroquois monograph, the League of the Iroquois (1851) and his synthetic account of social evolution, Ancient society (1877); less well known outside of anthropology is the massive, highly technical work on kinship published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1871, called Systems of consanguinity and affinity of the human family, which is the subject of this article. This Society played a curious role in its publication. On April 29th, 1867, Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian, wrote to the secretary of our Society, the Sanskritist William Dwight Whitney. Accompanying the letter was the manuscript of Morgan's Systems of consanguinity and affinity. Henry asked Whitney to form a committee of the American Oriental Society a view of ascertaining whether it is an article of sufficient originality and importance to merit a place in the Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge.2 Behind these bland words lay a troubled history which Henry chose not to recount, and considerable anxiety. Nine years previous he had offered the assistance of the Smithsonian to Morgan in printing and sending to correspondents round the world a questionnaire on more than 200 kinship relations. The Smithsonian had given Morgan a grant for an amanuensis to help in the compilation, from the returns, of huge, synoptic tables of the kinship terminologies of many languages. Round these tables Morgan built the first version of the Systems of consanguinity and affinity, which he submitted for publication to the Smithsonian in 1865. Henry was alarmed at the bulk and prolixity of the work to which he had, to a degree, committed the Institution. He sent it to two Princeton professors for review, briefing them in detail as to his own view of its deficiencies; they recommended publication, but obligingly embraced in their reports most of the recommendations for revision which Henry had proposed. Morgan rewrote the manuscript and submitted the revised version in 1867 thinking that as he had now complied with the changes required of him the work was accepted for publication. He asked Henry for confirmation; but before replying Henry sent the manuscript to Whitney for review by an AOS committee. Morgan was furious when he found out that there was to be a second review. * Presented at the 195th meeting of the American Oriental Society, Ann Arbor, 15 April, 1985, this paper draws upon research toward a book on Morgan's kinship work to be called Lewis Henry Morgan and the invention of kinship. I should like to acknowledge, with thanks, the help of the Rush Rhees Library of the University of Rochester for access to the Morgan Papers, and especially of Mr. Karl Kabelac, Manuscripts Librarian, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections; the Smithsonian Institution Archives, for copies of the Joseph Henry correspondence (Mr. William Cox); and the American Oriental Society for copies of letters of Joshua Hall Mcllvaine (Professor Stanley Insler). Research was assisted by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, The University of Michigan. I am grateful to Ms. Jeannette Kay Ranta for the typing. I Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (1861); Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient law (1861); Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, La cite antique (1864); John Ferguson McLennan, Primitive Marriage (1865). ' Henry to Whitney, 4/29/1867, Smithsonian Institution. 3 One of the reviewers was Professor Joshua Hall Mcllvaine who, before coming to the College of New Jersey (as it then was) in 1860 had been Morgan's pastor and close friend as stated elsewhere in this paper; the other was Professor William Henry Green. Henry's charge to Mcllvaine, 4/26/ 1865; to Green, 12/65; Green's report, 3/14/66; Mcllvaine's report, 3/29/66; Morgan to Henry 10/29/66, 2/21/67 and