Households and Families of the Longhouse Iroquois at the Six Nations Reserve (review)

The University of Nebraska Press deserves much credit in publishing this little-known classic of anthropology, a dissertation that went against the grain in Iroquoian studies. From 1956 to 1958, the late Merlin G. Myers, professor of anthropology at Brigham Young University, undertook valuable fieldwork at three Iroquois longhouses—Onondaga, Seneca, and Sour Springs—at the Six Nations Reserve in Ontario, Canada. Myers worked under the tutelage of the eminent University of Chicago anthropologist Fred Eggan, who prior to his death wrote the forward to Myers's book.

Myers credited the late William N. Fenton for introducing him to the Six Nations community as well as Floyd Lounsbury for teaching him the Cayuga language. Yet, Myers's approach was far different from those of other Iroquoianist scholars of the period, since he was trained in and approached fieldwork from a British functionalist tradition. To him, lineage, namely a descent group having a common ancestor, was a defining factor. Other anthropologists such as Fenton focused on clan, a social unit consisting of several lineages. In examining naming practices, Myers looked at the contextual framework and the obligations that were associated with them. Other anthropologists such as Annemarie Shimony examined names as a reflection of an individual's tribal affiliation, status, and ritual and medicinal importance or focused on cultural retention in the face of acculturative forces. Unlike Frank Speck, who examined Cayuga culture at a single longhouse (Sour Springs), Myers was less focused on culture than on social structure and social relations as reflected in his research at three longhouses.

Besides the incredibly valuable raw data that the author presents relating to Iroquois subsistence patterns, households, kinship, and marriage, Alice Myers, an active participant in her husband's research in the 1950s, provides important information in the book's introduction about Merlin's approach to fieldwork and how he differed from other anthropologists of that era. M. Sam Cronk of Indiana University, whose American Indian Studies Research Institute helped sponsor this publication, provided the afterward, which describes the Six Nations Reserve at the turn of the twenty-first century. The monograph also contains valuable linguistic information, and Myers provides a helpful glossary with a pronunciation key.