Modern versions of ‘Ancient Society’ by Lewis Henry Morgan?

[DJP]

Morgan’s book ‘Ancient Society’ is famously know to have made an impression on Marx and Engels, and was the main inspiration for Engels book ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’.

‘Ancient Society’ was written in 1877, and I would hope that anthropology has moved on since then. Can anyone recommend either any modern commentaries on Morgan’s or Engel’s book or any other modern books written on the same topic?

[ALB]

Anthropolgy has certainly moved on since 1877!  One of the best books seeking to vindicate the idea of social evolution (which for a while some anthropologists denied) from a position sympathetic to Lewis Henry Morgan is The Evolution of Culture by Leslie A White that first came out in 1959.White was an active member of the DeLeonist Socialist Labor Party of America from 1929 to 1946 writing for the Weekly People, etc and remained a member afterwards till 1959 (he died in 1975). For more info on him and his anthropological theories see here and here.

[DJP]

There’s an interesting interview with ‘Marxist’ anthropologist Chris Knight here:http://en.internationalism.org/world-revolution-radioOf particular interest is his treatment / analysis of ancient myth.

[ALB]

You’ve got to read Chris Harman’s brilliant reply here to the somewhat eccentric views of Chris Knight. OK, I know he was an SWPer but Knight is in the Labour Party.

[DJP]

Looks like an interesting piece, I’ll have to print it out to read it all though.’Zombie Capitalism’ was a great name for a book though, but perhaps ‘Vampire Capitalism’ is a more acurate description.Knight’s ideas do seem out on a limb, from what little I know of the subject (not much) but of course that in itself does not mean that they are wrong…

[robbo203]

ALB wrote:

Anthropolgy has certainly moved on since 1877!  One of the best books seeking to vindicate the idea of social evolution (which for a while some anthropologists denied) from a position sympathetic to Lewis Henry Morgan is The Evolution of Culture by Leslie A White that first came out in 1959.

 I think the issue of social evolutionism in anthropological circles is an interesting one and not quite cut and dried,   Back in the 19th century Sir James Frazer wrote an influential book The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion  (1890) which posited a so called ” primitive mind” which he portrayed as superstitious and irrational  and which he contrasted with the modern scientific rational mind.   This was representative of a kind of ethnocentric essentialistic approach to what earlier in the 18th century was called “the Problem of the Savage”.  In the  Medieval era you has this cosmological notion of a Great Chain of Being  (actually it goes back to the Ancient Greeks)  in  which human beings were seen as intermediate between the  animal world and the angels by virtue of possessing a soul. In the early modern era,  European explorers, on  first encountering the “Savage”, were  struck by  the great differences between these so called primitive cultures and modern European societies.  Hence “the Problem of the Savage” – how to accommodate the Savage within this overall hierarchical schema when all human beings purportedly occupied the same level  within this Great Chain This problem was effectively “resolved” in the course of the 19th century by the transformation of the old Great Chain idea into the notion of a racial hierarchy  under the influence of  Darwinian evolutionary theory. You can see where this kind of fits in with what I said above about the “primitive mind versus the modern mind”. Point is that quite  a bit of subsequent anthropology was devoted to combating this sort of racist ethnocentrism .  I can remember reading Evans Pritchard’s  Witchcraft , Oracles and Magic among the Azande (1937) which called into question this whole idea of the primitive mind. EP showed, for instance,  that the very procedures that the Azande adopted to determine witchcraft  – such as the famous chicken oracle –  mimicked scientific methodology e.g. double blind tests  EP was trying to say that it was quite misleading to think of human beings developing – or evolving – from one way of looking at the world into another.  Rationality – and irrationality – in other words are universal human traits  that occur throughout  our historyI note the wikipeda article on Leslie White refers to Franz Boas who was a prominent figure in cultural anthropology and a fierce critic of evolutionary theory.   But as I understand it Boas specifically rejected a teleological version of evolutionary theory  (not evolutionary theory per se) such as was apparently held by Lewis Henry Morgan – the notion that history is a process of “unfolding” and development  through predetermined stages  towards some predetermined end.  This is different  from the idea of evolution by natural selection.  Did not Marx himself welcome the fact that Darwin has banished teleology from the natural sciences? . If so, that sort of makes the relationship between Marx and Morgan a little more problematic than it might first appear

[stuartw2112]

Hi DJP,Chris Knight’s views are eccentric, and not generally accepted among his peers. The most recent (friendly) criticism I read was by human origins specialist Chris Stringer, who said that Knight’s answers are ingenious, but are answers to the wrong questions. Having said that, no one among his peers doubts that his (eccentric) views are nevertheless built solely on widely accepted theories and on the most up to date findings in the relevant fields (primatology, archaeology, anthropology, etc). It’s a long time since I’ve read it but I think I’d still recommend Chris Knight’s Blood Relations (1991) for the same kind of reasons that Dawkins and other scientists recommend Roger Penrose’s books on consciousness: even if the central eccentric idea is wrong, you’ll nevertheless learn a lot about the present(ish) state of play in science by reading it. It is also an attempt (to answer your first question) to rescue Engels/Morgan and defend the general validity of their ideas.Anthropologist David Graeber’s books are also worth pursuing, particularly his new one on Debt, which mentions Morgan in passing.CheersStuart

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