National Appropriations and Cultural Evolution: The Spatial and Temporal US of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Native America

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 33, no. 3, 2003 National Appropriations and Cultural Evolution: The Spatial and Temporal US of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Native America Yael Ben-zvi Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) is remembered today primarily as a marginal nineteenth-century ethnologist, whose contribution to anthropology was limited to the inception of kinship studies. Other than that, Morgan is remembered—often ironically—as a “friend of the Indian,” a title he had wished to earn by intermingling his interest in Native American cultures with philanthropic intentions, and as a somewhat delusional amateur, whose evolutionist thought was strongly criticized by Franz Boas (1858–1942). The first US scholar to direct dissertations in anthropology and a major force in the field’s professionalization, Boas promoted the idea of cultural relativism by refuting previous theories—including Morgan’s—that emphasized a unified evolutionary scale on which all cultures could be ordered. While Boas has been constituted as the father of American anthropology , Morgan eventually became an obscure figure, locked in an old box of refuted theories and bad science. Still, some Morgan scholars claim that he should be regarded as a pioneer of American anthropology.1 My analysis in this paper is not aimed at redeeming Morgan’s theories or status. I am interested in his efforts to create a coherent sense of national existence rooted in colonized space, as I believe that these processes have broad implications for understanding the tensions between colonialism and nationalism in US culture. I argue that Morgan appropriated Native American cultures and subordinated them to an evolutionary framework, in order to naturalize US culture and root it in the colonized space of what has been called “America.” Canadian Review of American Studies 33 (2003) 212 Morgan’s full-blown contribution to evolutionary theories was formulated in his fourth book, Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization, where humanity is divided so that each group belongs to a certain “ethnological period” on a totalizing scale of progress, ranging from savagery through barbarism to civilization. Morgan argues that “the Australians and Polynesians” fit the “middle status of savagery”; certain Native American tribes, at “the time of their discovery”, the “upper status of savagery.” The “Indian tribes of the United States east of the Missouri River,” together with “tribes of Europe and Asia,” fit the “lower status of barbarism”; Native Americans in “New Mexico, Mexico, central America and Peru,” as well as some Asian tribes and “ancient Britons,” the “middle status of barbarism ”; and “the Grecian tribes of the Homeric age” and “the Italian tribes shortly before the founding of Rome,” as well as “the Germanic tribes of the time of Caesar,” the “upper status of barbarism,” which marks the dawn of civilization. Civilization proper begins with “the production of literary records,” primarily, for Morgan, with classical Greek and Roman cultures (10–2). The fact that this classification scheme allows Morgan to pair distant cultures together in a single “ethnological period” implies that evolution is perceived and articulated as a creature of temporality, detached from territorial concerns. A similar disassociation of evolutionary logic and territory was expressed by John L. O’Sullivan— who coined the term “manifest destiny,” which today can hardly be conceived in non-territorial terms—who argued in “The Great Nation of Futurity” that “American patriotism is not of soil” and subjected the idea of national destiny to an “expansive future” rather than to actual space (429).2 In stark contrast to O’Sullivan’s approach, Morgan’s evolutionary thought was, somewhat paradoxically , rooted in perceptions of nationalized space, as the culmination of colonization in the service of progress. Morgan’s spatialization of progress was aided by the appropriation of Native American cultures and the simultaneous naturalization of Anglo colonization, in a process that sheds light on the structure of US nationalism. The reality of settler colonialism and Morgan’s position as a nativeborn settler whose nationality was grounded in a settler-colonial project are crucial for this discussion. My analysis in this paper presupposes a fundamental distinction between settler colonialism and other forms of colonial rule. In The Colonial...