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L ewis H. M organ's W estern F ield T rips *
Author(s) -
White Leslie A.
Publication year - 1951
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1951.53.1.02a00030
Subject(s) - white (mutation) , citation , library science , history , computer science , biochemistry , chemistry , gene
HERE has been a tradition among American anthropologists of the T twentieth century that the defects and shortcomings of the earlier, and particularly the evolutionary, anthropologists were due to too much theorizing and too little field work or none at all. I t has been customary to dub the classical evolutionists " closet, " or armchair , philosophers.' The corrective for the " theoretical excesses " of the early ethnologists, according to this tradition , was, in the words of Edward Sapir, '(the sobering influence of field work among the American aborigines. " 2 The life and work of Lewis H. Morgan (1818-1881) provide a salutary corrective to this tradition-not to mention the field researches of Ad. Fletcher, and others. Morgan was unquestionably one of the most eminent and influential theoreticians of the nineteenth ~ e n t u r y. ~ But he was also an industrious, critical, versatile and productive field worker as well. According to Clark Wissler, Morgan was " a pioneer, if not the initiator of field study in cultural phenomena. " l He began his ethnological researches among the Iroquois tribes, in whose territory he was born and reared, in 1842 or '43, and continued them assiduously until the publication of The League of the Ho-de-no-sau-nee or Iroquois in 1851-" the first scientific account of an Indian tribe ever given to the world, " as John Wesley Powell termed it? With the publication of The League, Morgan laid ethnological researches aside in order to devote himself to his legal profession and to his domestic for placing a t his disposal journals and correspondence in the Lewis H. Morgan archives. He wishes also to thank Miss Margaret Butterfield of the staff of the Rush Rhees Library for generous assistance in working with these materials. Morgan's journal of his trip to Colorado and New Mexico in 1878 has already been published (White, ed., 1942). The journals for the expeditions of 185!9-62 are now being edited, and i t is hoped that they will be ready for publication in the near future. for a summary statement of the attitude of the Boas school toward theorizing. " Morgan was undoubtedly the greatest sociologist of the past century, " Haddon, 1910, p. 165. 6 Powell, 1880, p. 115. Seventy years after the publication of The League, Alexander Golden-weiser, who had himself done considerable field work among the Iroquois, asserted that …