In his 1891 preface to the fourth edition of his work, Family State and Private Property, Friederich Engles notes the following about Lewis Henry Morgan’s work, Ancient Society (1877), upon which his own study was based:

Morgan’s discoveries are now generally recognized, or rather appropriated, by prehistorians in England, too. But scarcely one of them will openly acknowledge that it is to Morgan that we owe this revolution in outlook. In England his book is hushed up as far as possible, and Morgan himself is dismissed with condescending praise for his previous work; the details of his exposition are eagerly picked on for criticism, while an obstinate silence reigns with regard to really great discoveries. The original edition of Ancient Society is out of print; in America there is no profitable market for books of this sort; in England, it would seem, the book was systematically suppressed, and the only edition of this epoch-making work still available in the book trade –the German translation.

Times may have been changing, and today Morgan’s book may be somewhat easier to obtain, but the situation in Anthropology has militated against its presence. The story up to the end of the 1970s was told by the late Evelyn Reed (see, among others, The Challenge of the Matriarchy).

Noting, for instance, how Morgan’s work had been discarded by the profession, she states:

After the turn of the century new trends of thought arose, led by Boas, Radcliffe-Brown, and others, who rejected the method and principal findings of the founding scholars [Lewis H. Morgan, Edward B. Tyler] –even while paying anniversary homage to them.
These schools abandoned a comprehensive evolutionary approach and substituted in its place empirical and descriptive field studies of contemporary primitive peoples surviving in various parts of the globe. They discarded Morgan’s three stages of social evolution –from savagery through barbarism to civilization –without offering any pattern of progression of their own. They say it is not possible or even necessary to go back to savagery, although this earliest historical period was by far the longest, comprising 99% of human life on earth. They foreshortened human history to the last ten thousand years or less of the million-year span of its evolution. (The Challenge of the Matriarchy, 1978)

She quotes the following by David M. Schneider, to show how abandoning the matriarchy concept had been followed by an attempt to erase its institutions from the record, and illustrating the sad state of affairs this had led to in anthropology by that time:

For a while anthropologists used to write papers about Totemism. Goldenweiser and others then demolished that notion and showed that totemism simply did not exist…. It became, then, a non-subject. In due course Lévi-Strauss wrote a book about that non-subject, in which he first explained that it was a non-subject and therefore could not be the subject of the book. The “matrilineal complex” suffered the same fate in the hands of Lowie.
In my view, “kinship” is like totemism, matriarchy, and the “matrilineal complex.” It is a non-subject…. If you like to think that I have devoted a good part of my intellectual life to the industrious study of a non-subject, you are more than welcome to do so. If you think that I have now talked myself out of a subject for study you are quite right, too [David M. Schneider: What is Kinship All About? in Kinship Studies in the Morgan Centennial Year].

I cite this merely to indicate the direction things had taken more than thirty years ago. If the situation surrounding Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks is anything to go by, the situation has not improved. Franklin Rosemont notes the following:

In the lamentable excuse for a “socialist” press in the English-speaking world, this last great work from Marx’s pen has been largely ignored. Academic response, by anthropologists and others, has been practically nonexistent…

And:

Typically although the existence of the notebooks has been known since Marx’s death in 1883, they were published integrally for the first time only eighty-nine years later, and then only in a highly priced edition aimed at specialists.

Looking it up on the Internet, I found very little reference to the Ethnological Notebooks beyond Rosemont’s review –and a few brief references to a new “forthcoming” version, Patriarchy and Property edited by D.N. Anderson and N.D. Smith –supposedly to appear in 2003. Like so many controversial books (and papers –and conferences) it seems not to have surfaced yet. Will it ever? Meanwhile, if you live anywhere near Jerusalem, there appear to be two second-hand copies down that way of the 1972 edition priced at more than US$ 150.

November 29, 2005
Pic. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-81)
See Franklin Rosemont’s Marx and the Iroquois