Thought and Society:
The Interplay of Mind and Culture in Morgan’s Theory
Alessandro Lazzarelli
Institute of Anthropology
National Tsing Hua University
In his work “Ancient Society” (1964), Morgan provides a general model of human progress, viewed as the result of an accumulation of human’s knowledge through consequent stages. Although influenced by the world view of his time, characterized by a widespread consensus among social scientists upon the evolutionist conception of human progress, Morgan analyzed a fundamental issue that is still controversial in recent anthropological works, the one of the relation between mind and culture. In fact, despite the fact that some ideas upon kinship and society contained in the “Ancient Society” have been challenged by new ethnographic data, the domain of the intersection between biology and culture, carried out through the same work, has posed a big challenge for anthropologists. We could ask then what is the consequence of Morgan’s view for the social sciences? Has the priority of mind over culture, implied by Morgan’s work, been replaced by other models in the twentieth century’s anthropology? Or is the intertwinement between mind and culture still a controversial issue in anthropology?
Before considering these questions let us take a brief look at Morgan’s work. According to the author, the evolution of culture or to use his words “human progress” is the result of a process of growth and accumulation of basic ideas such as subsistence, government, language, family, religion, architecture, and property. The same process of evolution can be articulated into three main stages, respectively savagery, barbarism, and civilization, which in Morgan’s view represent universal stages of cultural development in all populations. From this the necessity of comprehending these three levels of cultural development through a comparative study of different cultural contexts, according to which a parallelism can be traced between certain aboriginal societies and the social organization of ancient societies such as the Grecian and Roman ones.
A central and recurrent point in Morgan’s theory is the role played by the mind in the construction of social institutions, or, to put it differently, the influence that the evolution of rational thought exerted on culture. Indeed, the author speaks of growth of ideas in four domains: “the growth of intelligence through inventions and discoveries”, “the growth of the idea of government”, “the growth of the idea of the family”, and “the growth of the idea of property” (Trautmann 1987:21). Morgan suggests that the development of the brain—which corresponds to an augmented rational and logical thought, as well as the development of more complex and refined ideas—is reflected in the transformation of culture, from primary institutions up to elaborated social and political structures. For this purpose he takes into account the organization and structure of the Iroquois society, showing how this American Indian culture resembles the organization of the Grecian and Roman societies. In short, three main points emerge from Morgan’s work. First, the evolution of culture can be analyzed in psychological terms for it reflects the evolution of the mind, assigning a priority to biological evolution over the cultural one. Second, all societies either in synchronic or diachronic perspective are interpreted under different levels of a unilineal cultural development, which goes from savagery to civilization. Third, from the previous two points it follows a distinction between “primitive society”, which is characterized by ties of kinship, and a “civil society”, organized upon property relations and territorial distinctions.
In the light of these theoretical considerations, we can then go back to the initial questions. Regarding the relation between mind and culture in anthropological studies, Morgan may be recognized in a certain extent as the precursor of cognitive anthropology, as he attempted to build a bridge between cognition and cultural institutions. It is important to note though, that Morgan not only introduced the evolution of mind in the study of culture, but also assigned to the former a priority over the latter. Such a priority is hardly accepted by the present cognitive anthropology, which has shown how mind and culture are interdependent variables that influence one another.
Finally, referring to the implications of Morgan’s view in his time, we may expect that his idea of evolution of the mind led him to embrace racist positions upon intellectual differences among races. On the contrary, Morgan was committed to philanthropic and political activity in favor of the Indian. Indeed as Bieder (1980) has shown, not only Morgan, but also some members of the Grand Order of the Iroquois interpreted differences between Indians and Whites in terms of psychological differences. According to these differences the latter should be led by the former toward the acquisition of a new order of things in the total respect of the Iroquois’ knowledge and social structure.
References
Morgan, Lewis Henry
1964 [1877] Ancient Society. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Beider, R.E.
1980 The Grand Order of the Iroquois: Influences on Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ethnology. Ethnohistory 27:349-60.
Trautman, Thomas R.
1987 Lewis Henry Morgan and the Invention of Kinship. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
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