Transformative Expansions

Abstract

In the preface to his culminating masterwork, Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877), pioneering American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan articulates one of that text’s and his career’s principal goals: to determine “why other tribes and nations have been left behind in the race of progress.” To answer that question, Morgan developed the theory of cultural evolution, an argument that cultures progress through the three stages indicated in the book’s subtitle. As the word “other” implies, Morgan views the Native American tribes and nations on which his text focuses as distinctly outside of mainstream American culture; but he concurrently sees them as illustrative of an earlier stage in that culture, arguing in the preface that “the history and experience of American Indian tribes represent … the history and experience of our own remote ancestors when in corresponding conditions.” Motivated by that sense of his subject’s national and contemporary relevance as well as by his own anthropological methodology, Morgan is in Ancient Society as thorough and nuanced in his descriptions and analyses of Native American cultures as he was throughout his career; but his theory and perspective on those cultures nonetheless provide perfect corollaries to contemporary visions of Native Americans as a vanishing people.