The Names of the Father: Lewis Henry Morgan, Ely Parker, and the Invention of Kinship

This paper offers an account of the origins of the anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan’s seminal 1871 text Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, which helped establish kinship as the supreme object of study in the burgeoning discipline of social anthropology. That story begins with the fateful meeting between Morgan and a young Seneca Indian named Ely Parker in an Albany bookstore. Parker was in Albany to advocate and serve as an interpreter for a delegation of Tonawanda Seneca chiefs who were fighting efforts by the federal government to remove them from their lands. The information that Morgan gathered from Parker that day piqued his interest in Iroquois family structure. In collaboration with Parker, Morgan devised an elaborate questionnaire, which he then mailed to informants all over the world. With their replies he was able to collect massive amounts of data about Indigenous family structures.

I trace the origins of Morgan’s key insights back to a problem of translation and, in particular, the difficulty of translating Indigenous kinship terminology and especially Indigenous words that designated a class of relatives with the same word (i.e. single words that were used to designate both an individual’s father and any of the father’s brothers). I show how Morgan’s ideas developed alongside the concurrent dispossession of Indigenous lands, and that Morgan was particularly interested in the problem of how property distribution would work in societies that failed to designate individual relatives as inheritors. His response to this problem was to tell a story about the history of social organization that cast Indigenous societies as exemplars of an earlier stage of development. The deliberate project of dispossession could then appear to serve the inevitable march of progress.