Cracks in the Theory: The Problems of the Pacific

Abstract

In the research for Southern Anthropology it became clear that the order in which first Fison and then Howitt were introduced to specific anthropological concepts or read particular books proved significant to their subsequent analysis. The first important instance of this was the version of the schedule that Fison received from Morgan along with his accompanying explanation. It was dated 1860 and contained details of Amerindian and Tamil and Telugu kinship forms as proof of the reach of the Asian system across the Bering Strait. Crucially, it did not contain the schema that Morgan developed in the mid-1860s to explain how he believed kinship systems changed through time, based predominantly on the Hawaiian schedule. This chapter explores the development of Morgan’s schema, the problems caused by efforts to fit Fison’s Rewan and Tongan schedules into Morgan’s theory and the tensions across the Atlantic as the British critiqued Morgan’s thesis using Fison’s schedules.