Books - Lewis Henry Morgan

Customer Review: Scientific analysis:
Anthro major? You might be surprised how much and how many tools come from Engels, as in Marx and Engels of Capital fame. The same analytical tools they applied to economics (That are used every day) here are applied to anthropological study of the basis of our present day social institutions.
Relevant today, as much as for info as for seeing where the ideas discussed lead to the arguments and theories of today.

Product Description:
This work has an introduction from Ichele Barratt, one of Britain's leading feminist writers, who discusses the relevance for the modern feminist novement of Engle's conclusions about the family.



Customer Review: they were wrong but you have to know why:
Marx and Engels made a fundamentally wrong guess about the nature of human beings. But it is very important to understand their line of reasoning, because they developed quite a few critical insights along the way. Due to political charge associated with their teachings it is practically impossible to find suitable third party narrative of their works. So, the only way to enlighten yourself is to dig right down into originals.

Customer Review: Why doesn't the war of the sexes ever end?:
Why is society so cruel? It seems to be self-defeating. Why doesn't the war of the sexes ever end? In no other species do the two sexes battle against each other.

In this book we learn that things weren't always this way. In fact, oppression and exploitation are recent inventions, if we count that human history dates back EIGHTY thousand years since the rise of homo sapiens sapiens. At one point most cultures suddenly became sedentary and agriculturalist - and private property in the land emerged. Private property of land resulted in an overthrow of the matriarchal family by its male members and in the establishment of a separate group of men who violently protect unequal relationships (the state as we know it today). All happened together in a revolution that occurred in the course of just a few generations some SIX thousand years ago.

Nonetheless, the moral of this story is one of hope. If we were capable of remaking ourselves once, and based on that have advanced dramatically in a limited sense of creating material culture, then humankind can remake itself again and found a culture that enriches all aspects of everyone's lives. But this time the redesign will have to be conscious and conscientious, the beginning of a humane human history in which all participate on an equal basis. Such is the future that socialism and communism promise for us.

As a companion to this volume, be sure to read Women's Evolution, by Reed. Written a century later, it shows that anthropology's evidence overwhelmingly coincides with the theory Engels put forward in this book.

Customer Review: Relevant Today:
Was human society always overseen by a military and police force?
Was wealth and the means of producing more wealth always the private possession of individuals or a small section of society?
Were women always at the bottom of society, treated primarily as sex objects and machines for child-bearing and child-raising?

And is this humanity's destiny?
In this book published in 1884, Fredrich Engels answers the above questions in the negative. His book is based on anthropological data available in his day from societies around the globe. New discoveries since have confirmed his conclusions and the book is remarkably relevant today.

Customer Review: Tearing Down Social Icons:
Are the father-centered family, private property, and the state necessary and inevitable part of all human societies?
Frederick Engels, coworker of Karl Marx, says no. Engels demonstrates that these three institutions arose in the fairly recent history of the human race, as a way to establish the rule of the many over the few. And, conversley, when these institutions are an obstacle to human progress, they can be dismantled.
Although this book was written about 125 years ago, the subject matter and his point of view sound surprisingly modern. Evelyn Reed, a Marxist anthropologist, writes a 1972 introduction that updates the original work from the point of view of 20th century anthropology debates abd the rise of modern women's movement. An additional short article by Engels, "The part played by labor in the transition from ape to man" is a lively piece that could be part of today's debates on human origin with almost no hint of its vintage (except maybe for his use of the term "man", instead of gender-neutral "humanity").

Customer Review: To change society we have to understand it:
This is a serious, scientific and materialist analysis of development and change in human society and its institutions. Frederick Engels, who along with Karl Marx was one of the central founders of the modern communist movement, wrote this book in the late 1800s based on the latest developments in the then-new science of anthropology. Studying it can help us understand society and be better prepared to organize and work to change it.

Engels takes up the rise of the state and of the family and the oppression of women as early societies became more productive, making possible the division of groups of human beings into those who produce and those who live off them, and the need of the exploiters to perpetuate this state of affairs.

The Pathfinder Press edition also has a valuable introduction by Evelyn Reed, long-time socialist activist and author of works including "Woman's Evolution," "Sexism and Science," "Cosmetics, Fashion and the Exploitation of Women," and "Problems of Women's Liberation."

Product Description:
This is the most complete biography of Morgan, a pioneering anthropologist, social theorist, railroad lawyer, and advocate for Native Americans, to date. Morgan explained how humans evolved beyond nature to both the splendor and squalor of the Industrial Age and offered an unprecedented analysis of the interplay between family, property relations, the state, and the human mind. Moses presents Morgan s life in great detail and tells how even today Morgan s influence is felt among environmentalists, anarchists, feminists, and other social visionaries.

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"Since their inauguration in 1963, the Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures have annually provided stimulation for those who have attended them, and each of the published series has found an interested and receptive audience. The Lectures not only commemorate Morgan and his work; they have as additional aims the encouragement of exploration and the presentation of recently developed views in anthropology.

Professor Colson’s Lectures, which opened the series’ second decade, pay full attention to these aims. Her intention, expressed in her title and in her text, is to consider "the problem of order," a matter of concern to Lewis Henry Morgan, a host of later anthropologists, and innumerable others in diverse fields.

Readers of these Lectures will find carefully forged links with the work of Morgan and that of others. They will also discover that Professor Colson’s skillful use of material from her work during the past thirty years with the Plateau and Gwembe Tonga of Zambia contributes, in a unique way, to the structure of her argument and to illumination of her major theoretical points."

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Meyer Fortes, one of the worldÂ’s most eminent social anthropologists, draws upon his many years of study and research in the field of kinship and social organization to review the development of anthropological theory and method from Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) to anthropologists of the 1960s. It is the central argument of this book that the structuralist theory and method developed by British and American anthropologists in the study of kinship and social organization is the direct descendant of MorganÂ’s researches.

Product Description:
Lewis Henry Morgan of Rochester, New York, lawyer and pioneer anthropologist, was the leading American contributor of his generation to the social sciences. Among the classic works whose conjunction in the 1860s gave modern anthropology its shape, Morgan's massive and technical Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family was decisive. Thomas Trautmann offers a new interpretation of the genesis of "kinship," and of the role it played in late nineteenth-century intellectual history.