Revision summary
Morgan sequenced family from promiscuity to monogamy with property. Socio-political order ran gens to tribe to territorial state. Savagery–barbarism–civilisation was invention-marked. McLennan, Maine, Bachofen, and Tylor kept evolution but not his rungs. Boas and Lowie rejected unilinear necessity.
Model answer
Introduction
Lewis Henry Morgan, in Ancient Society, lined up family and polity on one ladder from savagery to civilisation. Other evolutionists kept the ladder idea but moved the rungs.
Body
Morgan’s sequence
- He used Iroquois kinship and classical texts. Kin terms were fossils of older marriage.
- Family ran from promiscuity through group marriage, punaluan, pairing, and monogamy, tied to property.
- Polity ran from gens (clan) to phratry, tribe, and the state of property and territory, as in Rome and Greece.
- Savagery, barbarism, and civilisation were marked by inventions: fire, bow, pottery, agriculture, iron, writing.
Disagreements among evolutionists
- McLennan put bride-capture and female infanticide first, and doubted Morgan’s group marriage as a real stage.
- Lubbock and Spencer kept progress but stressed religion or military-industrial types more than gens.
- Bachofen had already put mother-right first. Morgan used matriliny as an early gens, which Maine patriarchy contradicted.
- Tylor shared unilinear culture but worked from animism and survivals, not from Iroquois terms as law.
- Engels accepted Morgan and tied the monogamous family to private property. That political use later drew ethnographic fire.
Later evolutionary critique
- Boas and Lowie showed clans, states, and marriage forms do not travel in one world order.
- Maine’s status-to-contract still differed: Roman law, not Iroquois, was his engine.
- Field cases of Australian sections and African states broke the single gens-to-state story.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD M[Morgan Ancient Society] --> F[Family stages] M --> P[Gens to state] D[McLennan Maine Tylor] --> X[Other rungs] B[Boas Lowie] --> Y[No one ladder]
Conclusion
Morgan joined family, property, and the state on one invention-marked ladder. Fellow evolutionists disputed group marriage, mother-right, and the gens as universal rungs, while Boasians later dropped the ladder.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Did Morgan invent fieldwork?
He used Iroquois knowledge and questionnaires. It is not Malinowski’s year-long village method.
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Is any part of Morgan still used?
Kinship terminology types remain. The three-age moral ladder does not.
PYQ trend
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