Revision summary
Morgan ranked families from group marriage to Victorian monogamy. He linked terms, property, and a three-age history of culture. No ethnography confirms consanguine or punaluan stages. Boas, Lévi-Strauss, and feminist work dismantled the ladder. Keep his comparative kinship method, not his timetable.
Model answer
Introduction
Lewis Henry Morgan ranked families from promiscuity to monogamy as stages of progress. The scheme organised a vast kinship vocabulary. As history and as ethnography it fails.
Body
What he classified
- In Ancient Society and Systems of Consanguinity, Morgan moved from the consanguine family (sibling group marriage) through the punaluan (group of brothers marrying a group of sisters), syndyasmian pairing, patriarchal, and the monogamian family.
- He tied these to savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, and to Malayan, Turanian, and Aryan kinship terms.
- Engels took the scheme into a Marxist history of the family and private property.
Critical evaluation
- Fieldwork found no consanguine or punaluan stage as a real household. Trobriand, Nuer, and Andaman families are not rungs on that ladder.
- Boas and historical particularism rejected unilinear family history. Terms can be classificatory without proving group marriage.
- Lévi-Strauss shifted the problem to alliance and incest prohibition, not to Morgan’s fossils of promiscuity.
- Weiner and feminist kinship showed that Morgan’s endpoint—Victorian monogamy as the highest family—was ethnocentric.
- What survives is the method of comparing kinship terms, the Iroquois case, and the insight that family form is social, not a natural given.
Verdict
- Use Morgan as a founder of kinship study. Do not use his five families as a timetable of humankind.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD M[Morgan] --> ST[Consanguine to monogamian] ST --> X[No field stages] M --> KEEP[Kinship terms comparison] KEEP --> L[Later alliance descent]
Conclusion
Morgan classified family as evolutionary stages ending in monogamy. The typology is historically false. The comparative study of terms and of property in the family is his lasting gift.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Critically evaluate different types of social stratifications with suitable examples
Next question in the 2021 paper (Q7). View answer →
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Did Morgan invent kinship study?
He professionalised the comparison of terms and descent. Later schools kept the data and dropped the stages.
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Is the nuclear family the last stage?
That was his Victorian endpoint. Anthropology treats many family forms as contemporary, not as leftovers.
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