|
Article Excerpt
Lewis Henry Morgan's 590-page opus of tables and figures Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity, (1871) detailed 139 kinship systems from around the world (Tooker 1997:xii). It differed markedly from contemporary anthropological pastiches of explorer, missionary and settler anecdotes and narratives; for it was based on kinship schedules of over 280 terms, and required the close questioning of the informant for successful completion. Systems was held together by a fine thread of evolutionist conjecture in which Hawaii featured prominently as the base line of kinship. The following article examines the spread of kinship studies through Oceania (2) via Morgan's collaborator Lorimer Fison, and the importance of Pacific kinship systems to the development and challenging of Morgan's theory. A central question is whether the evolutionist theory of kinship progress along a single path, mapped onto existing populations and applicable to many of the burning questions of the period on relationships between human groups, was successfully challenged by the data and evidence that was collected from the periphery (Chambers and Gillespie 2000:223).
Lewis Henry Morgan's pioneer investigation into the socio-political structures of the Iroquois Indians in 1842 in order to replicate the system in his fraternal society, the Grand Order of the Iroquois, has entered the folklore of post-colonial American anthropology (Tooker 1983: 142, 1992: 359; Trautmann 1987: 40-43; van der Grijp 1997: 105). The American lawyer re-engaged with ethnology ten years later as new challenges to the doctrine of monogenesis--the single origin of humankind--emerged amongst American scientists who claimed multiple human origins and were bolstered by the cranial measurements of Samuel Morton and the work of Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz (Trautmann 1987: 27, 76-78). Throughout the 1850s and '60s, on both sides of the Atlantic and in settler societies across the world, debates raged over the distinctions between human populations and the theorising and measurement of human differences. Christian monogenists continued to insist on the single origin and essential similitude of all peoples but were increasingly challenged by scientific theories of multiple origins and immutable differences between human groups (Kenny: 2007). In Britain, members of both the Ethnological and the Anthropological Societies in England juggled physical and social evidence in their analysis of human diversity and a number embraced polygenesis, though the idea was heterodox in the wider community (Kenny 2007:382; Stocking 1968:75). Eventually both Evangelicals and polygenists were trumped by the new monogenism of the Darwinists who argued for the evolution of a single human species but at different rates that had led to longstanding and profound differences between 'races' measured physically according to the shape of the skull, the hue of the skin or the curl of the hair, or culturally through the progress of institutions, intellect or morality (Kenny 2007; Stocking 1968:56; 1987:148-50).
While Morgan initially believed in the fixity and permanence of species, he was eventually drawn to the temporal logic of Darwinian theory and, as with many other materialists of the period, transposed a simplified notion of biological adaptation onto human society, which he believed would be gradually perfected through time and along a single line. He described to his sceptical correspondent, Methodist missionary Lorimer Fison, his acceptance first of Darwin then the evolution of society based on the data provided by contemporary 'savages' and new evidence of human antiquity. (3)
When Darwin's great work on the origin of species appeared I resisted his theory, and was inclined to adopt Agassiz's views of the permanence of species. For some years I stood in this position. After working up the results from consanguinity, I was compelled to change them, and to adopt the conclusion that "man commenced at the bottom of the scale" from which he worked himself up to his present status, that the record of this progress is still preserved to a remarkable extent in his inventions and discoveries which stand to each other in the ages of savagism, or barbarism and of civilization in a progressive series; and in his domestic and civil institutions which have been developed through the same periods. (4)
Morgan's theory of evolving kinship forms from primitive promiscuity to civilised patriarchy asserted human similarity across geographic or climatic boundaries, thereby simultaneously narrowing the human genus into a single species while providing an evolutionist explanation for perceived differentials in social development. With the publication of Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity (1871) Morgan declared he had mapped the kinship systems of four-fifths of the 'entire human family' into the classificatory paradigms of contemporary science (Morgan 1871:xxii). Yet despite his claim for the global reach of his investigation, he was aware that many 'inferior nations' were unrepresented (Morgan 1871:xxiii). This was especially important for Oceania given Morgan's insistence that Hawaiian relationships revealed the earliest forms of kinship recorded and the final remnants of primitive promiscuity. As Morgan gathered material principally from American expatriates and especially missionaries, only those islands with American populations or missions, namely Hawaii, Kusaie (Kosrae) and Kingsmill (Kiribati), were properly represented. Southern Oceania was completely absent apart from one incomplete schedule gathered from the Maori mission at Wanganui, by the Reverend Richard Taylor under the auspices of the US consul to the Bay of Islands (Morgan 1871:519). Yet as the tables were being set, Morgan received schedules on Rewan and Tongan kinship from Lorimer Fison, Methodist missionary to the Rewa delta on the large Fijian island of Viti Levu. Fison's subsequent engagement with the contemporary theories and methods of kinship studies and the breadth of his investigation using missionary colleagues of all denominations, introduced a generation of missionaries to metropolitan anthropology (Gardner 2006a). Yet Fison was not simply Morgan's apprentice: his keen engagement with the inquiry and his determination to gather a complete set of schedules from the colonies of Australasia and the islands of the Pacific, led him to new perspectives on kinship studies and the realization that the data did not fit the clean logic of Morgan's development thesis. Indeed, Morgan's schema was quickly challenged in British, European and eventually American anthropology (Lubbock 1872; Makarius 1977; Wake 1879). Yet the reified theory of kinship development gained a much wider and enduring currency through the writings of Friedrich Engels and was particularly important for the positioning of Australian Aborigines on the ladder of evolutionism (Engels 1884; Hiatt 1996:59; Spriggs 1997; Tooker 1997:xii-xvii: Trautmann 1987: 251; van der Grijp 1997:122; Wolfe 1999:88).
As Trautmann has shown, Morgan's legal training in the Roman system of kinship led him to the profound appreciation of the alterity of the matrilineal Iroquois who not only 'follow the female'--rather than the male line of the Roman system--but also positioned the children as separate from the lather through kinship classes that determined marriage partners (Trautmann 1987: 53; van der Grijp 1997: 114). To the American lawyer the Amerindian system of reckoning relationships flew in the face of the Roman method and thus at the very heart of western civilisation for it denied inheritance of property or status from father to son. For Morgan, and a number of his anthropological contemporaries, the explanation that could both explain this aspect of human difference while containing the distinctions within the monogenist paradigm of the single human species was that the civilised family had a matriarchal communal origin, the central point of Engels' The Origin of the Family, Private ProperO, and the State (1884) (Hiatt 1996:60; Trautmann 1987: 2534; Wolfe 1999:73). Morgan's attempt to unravel his great kinship mystery: the divide between the patriarchal nuclear kinship systems of ancient Rome and contemporary Europe, and what he termed the 'classificatory' systems of Asia and the New World, led him to define the Amerindians he first investigated and all those who follow 'mother-right' as living remnants of European civilisation whose cultural forms showed the 'history and experience of our own remote ancestors' (Morgan, quoted in Trautmann 1987:28-29; Wolfe 1999:69-105).
Keen to confirm monogenist speculation, based on models of...
|
