ANTHRCUL 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Transhumance, Lewis H. Morgan, Sociocultural Evolution

• School: U of M
• Department: Anthropology, Cultural
• Course: ANTHRCUL 101
• Professor: Holly Peters- Golden

Document Summary

Morgan was primarily interested in marriage, family, kinship and social issues. Tylor focused more on religion and magic and other systems of ideology. Morgan"s theory is known as unilinear evolutionism: one path along which all societies develop. It was asserted that all societies passed through the same stages in the same order and arrived ultimately at the common end. The common end is said to be believed to look like the society they lived in. However, since this was during the 19th century, darwin"s theory of evolution was still the dominant theory. Culture evolved from the simple to the complex. Morgan said that all society passed through 3 different stages: savagery, barbarism and civilization. Morgan subdivided these 3 stages into lower, middle, and higher. Savages were the lowest level where they all lived together. They progressed into brothers and sisters sleeping together and then to group marriages, which was the farthest the savages get.