in anthropology Lewis Henry Morgan is considered a classical cultural evolutionist believing that cultures evolved from simple to complex forms instead of focusing on religion like Edward Tyler Morgan focused on explaining how marriage and family systems led to the development of modern social political organizations his work would be used by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who found in it support for their arguments about class-based societies originally a lawyer Morgan outlined specific stages of evolution where we could see how cultures different cultures differ depending on their types of technologies governments family and kinship systems how they defined property and other things including language by studying these different realms morgan argue that we could see how cultures developed through these different ethnical periods which are sub stages of cultural development morgan organizes these different ethnical periods into three main stages the first is savagery which includes hunting and gathering the second is barbarism which is when humans domesticated plants and animals in the last is civilization and this is when humans developed complex socio-political organizations ultimately developing what we call the state morgan argued that some cultures failed to evolve because certain conditions like technologies weren't developed enough to facilitate their evolution from one stage to the next Morgan argues that we can clearly see where cultures are in this hierarchy by primarily looking at a cultures technological advancements but he also explains that because family in kinship systems were the first types of political organizations ever developed by humans the way kinship is defined is crucial to understanding the history of modern civilization kind of like how the process of metallurgy is dependent on the establishment of fire before it all complex systems including capitalism can only be established because cultures pass through those earlier stages again we're talking about a linear evolution morgan defined to kinship systems classification systems and descriptive systems in classificatory systems a culture does distinguish between generations like parents and grandparents and they also distinguish between gender like male and female cousins but they use the same exact term for father and father's brother what we call an uncle and mother and mother sister what we would call and hunt on the other hand cultures that use descriptive systems distinguish between all of these relationships as an example here in the u.s. we use descriptive systems and as you can imagine that's considered a characteristic of more advanced cultures according to Morgan these advanced cultures have a more complex form of government that is based on territory and property instead of kinship this all sounds a bit complicated and unrelated but Morgan explains that this is all connected for two very important reasons first Morgan states that the reason mother and mother sister and father and father's brother have the same term is because in savage societies people lived in group families were siblings slept with each other's partners and possibly with each other as well this was Morgan's most basic and primitive stage of social organization it's important to note here that Morgan assumed this from how contemporary cultures define kinship not because current cultures actually do this Morgan believed that we could see the remnants of past forms of culture by studying modern cultures in these early stages people would actually defend their communal wives from outsiders and these attitudes eventually led to the modern nuclear family for Morgan monogamous marriage was considered the most advanced social stage this leads us to our second point which is that property becomes more important at the stage of civilization and this is because families now truly know which children belong to which parents unlike those communal families at the savage stage in the savage stages because families weren't sure of which children belonged to which father's family lineage was drawn through the maternal it wasn't until later stages where male kinship became instrumental to the development of civilization of course there's a power dynamic in considering matrilineal systems a savage trait and that's definitely something that later anthropologists took issue with but all the same this establishment of property in guiding politics was very important in Morgan's theories the development of property revolutionized cultures as morgan offers examples of how different stages of culture deal with property differently cultures still in the savage stage bury property with its owners then at the barbaric stage property was distributed widely sometimes with people owning land communally and lastly in civilization with more property and larger groups of people forming nations the modern political system allows property to be organized more efficiently but slowly property was given to a select number of people leading to more stratified societies with different social classes and this process is where marks and angles chimed in Morgan was a unique anthropologist in his time unlike many of his contemporaries who derive their theories from reason and archeological data Morgan actually conducted research and spoke with his informants for example when studying how iroquois kinship functioned and developed morgan actually spoke with and studied nearby Iroquois tribes who ultimately welcomed him into their culture in turn he helped them with their native land claims cases in court ultimately Morgan suffers from many of the same issues that we see in Edward Tyler's evolutionary theories they assume too much such as assuming that hunter-gatherer societies are below domestication and farming his theories lacked this nuance Morgan's ideas have been expanded on since he first wrote his most famous book ancient society and later theorists both those criticizing him and those supporting him have offered revolutionary ideas of their own on how and why cultures change [Music] it's