gens, to designate those groups of individuals who regarded themselves as descending through women from a common female ancestor. This was not a matter of chance. And he called the principle governing these kinship groups the ‘matrilineal descent’ rule. He also noted that, once men married, they left their clan and took up residence with their wife’s people. Lastly, he concluded from these observations that all these elements formed a coherent whole with its own logic, in other words, a ‘system’.
When he extended his study to other North American Indian tribes with different languages and cultures, he discovered that, beyond these differences, a number of them used kinship terminologies that had the same structure as that of the Seneca. This type of structure would come to be called ‘Iroquois’. Other groups, however, such as the Crow and the Omaha, had very different terminologies and marriage rules. Confronted with this diversity but also these convergences, Morgan decided to launch a worldwide survey of kinship terminologies and marriage rules. He drew up a questionnaire describing nearly a hundred possible kin ties with respect to a male or a female Ego, which constituted a sort of family tree ending or starting with Ego, and he sent out nearly one thousand copies to missionaries, civil servants and colonial administrators all over the world.14
Thanks to their replies, Morgan was the first person in history to dispose of such a quantity and diversity of information on kinship practices in societies dispersed widely over the face of the earth. Analysis and comparison of this data showed that the dozens of terminologies collected in totally unrelated languages turned out to be varieties or variants of a few types, which he dubbed Punaluan, Turanian, etc., and which we now, following Murdock, call ‘Hawaiian’, ‘Dravidian’, etc. As a consequence, European kinship systems, too, would appear as varieties of one of these structure types, the one that would come to be known as ‘Eskimo’. In 1871 Morgan gathered part of the data together with his theoretical conclusions into his famous Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, published under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, in the conclusion to which he stressed the importance of kinship relations in human history and particularly in ‘non-civilized’ societies.
We thus see how Morgan endowed anthropology with one of its objects of study (kinship), with a method for studying it (the genealogical questionnaire), and with a first batch of findings including the discovery of some of the rules non-European societies had chosen to organize ties of descent and alliance between the individuals and the groups that make up these societies.
But all this was possible only because of Morgan’s remarkable and persistent effort to decentre his thinking with respect to the categories of his own (Euro-American) society and culture. This decentring itself was made possible only by suspending judgement, by temporarily placing in brackets those things that were taken for granted and shared by the members of his society and culture. To be sure, suspension of judgement alone would not have given Morgan’s research a scientific character. He also had to learn to turn factual observations into problems to be solved, questions to be asked, in sum into a new way of considering the facts, breaking them down and putting them back together. But he also had to invent a method for observing facts in the field, concepts for describing them and hypotheses for attempting to explain them. Last of all, he had to pose the principle that, in order to understand the data collected in any society, one must compare it with data gathered in other societies, similar or not, close by or not.
Morgan’s approach thus marked a profound rupture with the spontaneous ethnography practised by missionaries, military officers, colonial administrators, traders and other representatives of the Western world, all of whom had been striving since the sixteenth century to improve their knowledge of the customs of the populations they were trying to convert, control or administer, and who had, in certain cases, set down their observations in letters, reports or accounts of their travels.
THE INCOMPLETE DECENTRING
But there is another side to Morgan’s work. As soon as his Systems was published, he turned to the task of marshalling all his data and analyses with a view to reconstructing, as so many were attempting at the time, the evolution of humankind. In 1877, he published Ancient Society,15 in which he described how humanity had gone from a primitive ‘savage’ state (scarcely differing from that of the animal world, and where promiscuity reigned between the sexes) through to the ‘civilized’ state. On this account, the greatest inventions of this last state had appeared in Western Europe and were continued in the United States of America in a new society, created by Europeans to be sure, but without the after effects of feudalism, which in the mid nineteenth century continued to hobble the march of progress and democracy in most nations of the Old World. In a speculative schema purported to explain the evolution of humankind via three successive stages of social development (the primitive savage state, the barbarian state and the civilized state), Morgan went on to assign to one or another of these stages each of the various exotic societies whose kinship terminologies he had collected and analyzed. Polynesian societies with their chiefs and complex social structures thus became witnesses to and vestiges of the age when, having just emerged from the primitive state of animal-like promiscuity, groups of brothers ‘married’ groups of sisters – a ‘fact’ that ‘explained’, according to Morgan, the characteristically small number of terms in ‘Hawaiian’ kin terminologies and their extensions, wherein all of the men and all of the women in the generation above an individual are his ‘fathers’ and ‘mothers’ and those of his own generation are his ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’.
In short, the same man who had managed to decentre his own thinking with regard to Western categories and had engendered a new discipline, this time around harnessed his findings to a speculative ideological version of history that – once again, though now with new arguments – made Europe and America the mirror in which humankind could at once contemplate its origins and measure its evolution, in a process that had left a great number of peoples far behind.
This explains why, twenty years earlier, Morgan had designated the Iroquois descent groups with the Latin term gens. As a jurist schooled in Roman law, he considered that the Iroquois clans held the key to understanding the Roman gens or the genos of the ancient Greeks. The kinship system of the nineteenth-century Iroquois was thus projected onto ancient Roman society. But, as the Iroquois gens (it would later be called ‘clan’) was matrilineal and the Roman gens patrilineal, the Iroquois were taken as providing evidence of an even more archaic state of the gens. This vision would rapidly (in 1884) be adopted by Friedrich Engels in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, in which he attempted to bring Morgan’s evolutionist speculations into line with Karl Marx’s historical materialism.
In the end, by presenting the Western nuclear – and monogamous – family as the most rational form of family, as that form in which the ‘blood’ ties connecting a child to his or her (real) father and to his or her (real) mother were finally visible, Morgan, despite his efforts to decentre his thinking with regard to the values and representations of his own society, was never able to treat the Western way of organizing kinship, the family and marriage as merely one cultural model among others, a model that was just as ethnocentric and therefore equally as ‘rational’ or ‘irrational’ as the others.
We now understand why Morgan’s work immediately drew so much criticism, targeted at his evolutionism, which, as it quickly became clear, had to be jettisoned if progress was to be made in exploring the domain he himself had helped to found as an object of scientific knowledge and upon which his work on the Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity had conferred its first letters of nobility.
For decades following Morgan, hundreds of field surveys, conducted in so-called ‘tribal’ societies of Africa, Asia, America and Oceania, or in ‘peasant’ societies in Europe, Asia and Latin America, confirmed the importance of kinship relations in the functioning of these societies.
LÉVI-STRAUSS AND HIS CRITICS
Once kinship ties began to appear as the very basis of these societies,
