Ancient Society By Lewis Morgan: Human Evolution As A System Of Ethnical Periods

In Ancient Society, Morgan attempted to outline the human evolution proposing a system of ethnical periods. Each of these periods signifies the different phases of human evolution is a sequential manner. There are different parameters he uses to mark these phases from each other, but these demarcations are not mechanical, their traces can be found manifested in previous and successive ethnical period as well, thus giving it a continuum and a linearity which he suggests as a singular.

His major thrust on the unilinearity, may have made it easier for him to classify the available and/or collected material he had, but also there is a greater underline throughout his writing – a singular grand design/process. As he himself writes in the preface, ” The History of human race is one in source, one in experience, one in progress”. Though he was premising this on a large amount of data and information, it was miniscule in relation to what he was trying to achieve, to map the history of human race. This essentialization became a ground for his severe criticism such as Robert H. Lowie classifies the book “Ancient Society” as a model of what not to do. As Leacock in Introduction suggests that Morgan was primarily a methodologist and his interests lied in the classifying the material available. And he tried to look for a pattern in those classified material and extrapolated his proposition to be true in other contexts as well. He was aware of the cultural specificity, but for him that was not the major ground of differentiation. He assumed that along with the cultural specificity the macro patterns were same. His chance meeting with Mr. Parker and their collaboration afterwards has raised a debate on the ethics of ethnography.

The conversation between a settler and an Indian in the backdrop of mass land appropriation lend a very strong power dynamic to this relationship. For the settler, who was new to the land and in search of the roots, the Indians became a subject of inquiry. Though he is talking about period – a timeline, but for him, the time was insignificant as different tribes were in a different phase in his schema of ethnical period at a given time. This simultaneity was relative based on anterior-posterior position on his unilinear scale of ethnical period. He talks about Semite and Aryan as the most advanced – leading the process during most phases. He characterizes each period based on major benchmark of the evolution like - family system, property inheritance, language, subsistence, law and institutions, agriculture, domestication of animals.