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  • Anthropology in History:Lewis Henry Morgan and Margaret Mead
  • Dennis Bryson (bio)
Daniel Noah Moses . The Promise of Progress: The Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009. xii + 332 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $47.50.
Maureen A. Molloy . On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008. x + 201 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.00.

Since the 1960s, American historians have extensively borrowed from the social sciences. Thus, cultural anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, and the other social sciences have provided historians with an array of methods, concepts, and theories. Significantly, historians have also come to address another project: taking social science itself as the object of historical inquiry. Dorothy Ross's The Origins of American Social Science (1991) stands out as an especially notable achievement, but there have been numerous contributions to this project in recent decades. More particularly, scholars have come to examine the history of specific disciplines within the social sciences. Thus, George W. Stocking's Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (1968) gave major impetus to exploring the history of anthropology. It was followed by work in this field by Richard Handler, Regna Darnell, and others. Two recent intellectual biographies—Daniel Noah Moses' The Promise of Progress: The Life and Work of Lewis Henry Morgan and Maureen Molloy's On Creating a Usable Culture: Margaret Mead and the Emergence of American Cosmopolitanism—represent important contributions, not only to the history of anthropology, but to the history of the American social sciences more generally.

Both Moses and Molloy attempt to situate the anthropologists that they examine—Lewis Henry Morgan and Margaret Mead, two of the most prominent anthropologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries respectively—within the intellectual and cultural worlds that they inhabited and in which they worked. Moses and Molloy also examine the influence of salient historical events and trends on the two figures. Most importantly, Moses and Molloy indicate the major civilizational and cultural problems addressed by the two [End Page 480] anthropologists. For Morgan the tension between nineteenth-century American commercial civilization—with its stress on acquisitive individualism—and the classical and republican values that he acquired during his education constituted a fundamental civilizational dilemma. Mead, on the other hand, focused on the problem of creating a modern, "cosmopolitan" American culture, oriented toward fostering the needs and aspirations of the individual, in the context of the emergence of consumer culture, the proliferation of new ideas regarding sex and freedom, the destabilization of gender roles, and the discrediting of the "Puritanism" and parochialism of American culture. Instructively, both Morgan and Mead elaborated their notions of ethnographic "others" within the framework of the problems and dilemmas that preoccupied them.

A successful lawyer and capitalist entrepreneur who lived most of his life in Rochester, New York, Morgan never held an academic position. Nevertheless, he became one of the major American anthropologists of the nineteenth century. Thus, Morgan was the author of League of the Ho-De'-No-Sau-Nee or Iroquois (1851), a pioneering ethnography of the Iroquois people; and his Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) did much to launch the study of kinship systems. Moreover, Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) represented an important and influential contribution to the theory of social evolution. Notwithstanding these achievements, Morgan has received little attention in recent decades; the last major biography to be published before the book by Moses is one that appeared in 1960.1 The attack on Morgan's evolutionary schema—with its unilinear sequence from savagery to barbarism to civilization—by Franz Boas and his students did much to discredit Morgan. Indeed, in spite of the recognition of Morgan's contribution to kinship studies by such anthropologists as Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as a resurgence of evolutionary theory championed by Leslie White and others during the twentieth century, Morgan's reputation never recovered from the Boasian critical assault. To be sure, there was much validity to the criticisms leveled against Morgan by Boas and his disciples. Morgan did take for granted the superiority of...

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