Lewis H. Morgan in the context of "Patriarchal"

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⭐ Core Definition: Lewis H. Morgan

Lewis Henry Morgan (November 21, 1818 – December 17, 1881) was an American anthropologist and social theorist, who worked as a railroad lawyer. He is best known for his work on kinship and social structure, his theories of social evolution, and his ethnography of the Iroquois. Interested in what holds societies together, he proposed the concept that the earliest human domestic institution was the matrilineal clan, not the patriarchal family.

Also interested in what leads to social change, he was a contemporary of the European social theorists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were influenced by reading his work on social structure and material culture, the influence of technology on progress. Morgan is the only American social theorist to be cited by such diverse scholars as Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud. Elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Morgan served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1880.

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Lewis H. Morgan in the context of Ulf Hannerz

Ulf Hannerz (born June 9, 1942, in Malmö) is a Swedish anthropologist known for his pioneering work on globalization, urban anthropology, multi-sited ethnography, and cultural theory. He is currently professor emeritus of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University. He was previously Chair of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, Director of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and Editor for Ethnos.

Hannerz, heralded for the remarkable breadth and prescience of his scholarship on an increasingly interconnected world, ranks among the most influential anthropologists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. For his contributions, he has been made an honorary fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and elected as a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Austrian Academy of Sciences. He is also the recipient of a Retzius Medal (now gold medal) from the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography and an honorary doctorate from University of Oslo. Hannerz has delivered the Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the University of Rochester and the Daphne Berdahl Memorial Lecture at the University of Minnesota.

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Lewis H. Morgan in the context of Primitive cultures

Urgesellschaft (meaning "primal society" in German) is a term that, according to Friedrich Engels, refers to the original coexistence of humans in prehistoric times, before recorded history. Here, a distinction is made between the kind of Homo sapiens as humans, who hardly differed from modern humans biologically (an assertion disputed by anthropology), and other representatives of the genus Homo such as the Homo erectus or the Neanderthal. Engels claimed "that animal family dynamics and human primitive society are incompatible things" because "the primitive humans that developed out of animalism either knew no family at all or at most one that does not occur among animals". The U.S. anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan and translations of his books also make use of the term.

In specificity, this long period of time is not directly accessible through historical sources. Nevertheless, in archaeology, the study of material cultures provides a variety of opportunities to gain a better understanding of this period, work that is likewise present in sociobiology and social anthropology, and in religious studies through the analysis of prehistoric mythologies.

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Lewis H. Morgan in the context of Lineal kinship

Inuit kinship (formerly Eskimo kinship) is a category of kinship used to define family organization in anthropology. Identified by Lewis H. Morgan in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, the Inuit system was one of six major kinship systems (Inuit, Hawaiian, Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, and Sudanese). The system of English-language kinship terms falls into the Inuit type.

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Lewis H. Morgan in the context of Primitive communism

Primitive communism is a way of describing the gift economies of hunter-gatherers throughout history, where resources and property hunted or gathered are shared with all members of a group in accordance with individual needs. In political sociology and anthropology, it is also a concept (often credited to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels), that describes hunter-gatherer societies as traditionally being based on egalitarian social relations and common ownership. A primary inspiration for both Marx and Engels were Lewis H. Morgan's descriptions of "communism in living" as practised by the Haudenosaunee of North America. In Marx's model of socioeconomic structures, societies with primitive communism had no hierarchical social class structures or capital accumulation.

The idea has been criticised by anthropologists as too ethnocentrically European a model to be applied to other societies, whilst also romanticising non-European societies. Anthropologists such as Margaret Mead argue that private property exists in hunter-gatherer and other "primitive societies" and provide examples that Marx and subsequent theorists label as personal property, not private property.

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Lewis H. Morgan in the context of Hawaiian kinship

Hawaiian kinship, also referred to as the generational system, is a kinship terminology system used to define family within languages. Identified by Lewis H. Morgan in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, the Hawaiian system is one of the six major kinship systems (Inuit, Hawaiian, Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, and Sudanese).

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Lewis H. Morgan in the context of Sudanese kinship

Sudanese kinship, also referred to as the descriptive system, is a kinship system used to define family. Identified by Lewis Henry Morgan in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, the Sudanese system is one of the six major kinship systems (Eskimo, Hawaiian, Iroquois, Crow, Omaha and Sudanese).

The Sudanese kinship system is the most complicated of all kinship systems. It maintains a separate designation for almost every one of Ego's (the individual's) kin, based on their distance from Ego, their relation, and their gender, and in some instances based on relative age. The patrilineal and matrilineal line are differentiated. Ego's father is distinguished from Ego's father's brother and from Ego's mother's brother; Ego's mother is similarly distinguished from Ego's mother's sister and from Ego's father's sister; et cetera. For cousins, there are up to eight possible terms.

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