Reply to Tooker

Abstract

Elizabeth Tooker (AA 94:357-375, 1992) rides to defend Morgan against my imputation that he worked in the shadow of metropolitan science.' She argues that I have proposed three false theses: (1) that the philological models favored by Morgan and Amerindian scholars were adapted from those developed by European scholars of the Indo-European language family; (2) that Morgan's ideas about the evolution of marriage and the family were prompted by the publication of McLennan's Primitive Marriage in 1865; and (3) that the theoretical framework of Ancient Society (Morgan 1877) was largely taken over from Lubbock and Tylor. None of these conclusions correct, she asserts. Morgan drew on American sources that were independent of European guidance, or on the same sources as those that inspired the British anthropologists. Far from responding to external stimuli at different phases of its development, Morgan's work is of piece. Moreover, Morgan bettered the British scholars because he was the first to achieve a comparative worldwide study based on original fieldwork, his own and that done under his supervision, on an ethnographic problem itself suggested by fieldwork (p. 358). 1. On philology, Tooker's argument that the Americanists (in the United States) developed their ideas independently from the same (unspecified) sources that had first inspired the original Indo-Europeanists. She concedes that there was communication