Morgan

MORGAN: ANCIEN SOCIETY

The concept of progress

The dominant idea of Morgan's thought is that of progress.[1] He conceived it as a career of social states arranged in a scale on which man has worked his way up from the bottom. Progress is historically true of the entire human family, but not uniformly. Different branches of the family have evidenced human advancement to differentconditions. He thought the scale had universal application or substantially the same in kind, with deviations from uniformity ... produced by special causes. Morgan hopes therefore to discern the principal stages of human development.[2]
Morgan arrived at the idea of a society's progress in part through analogy to individual development. It is an ascent to human supremacy on the earth. The primeanalogate is an individual working his way up in society; that is, Morgan, who was well read in classics, relies on the Roman cursus honorum, rising through the ranks, which became the basis of the English ideas of career and working your way up, to which he blends in the rationalist idea of a scala, or ladder, of life. The idea of growth or development is also borrowed from individuals. He proposedthat a society has a life like that of an individual, which develops and grows.
He gives the analogy an anthropological twist and introduces the comparative method coming into vogue in other disciplines. Lewis names units called ethna, by which he means inventions, discoveries and domestic institutions. The ethna are compared and judged higher or lower on the scale, pair by pair. Morgan'sethna appear to comprise at least some of Edward Burnett Tylor's cultural objects.[citation needed] Morgan mentions Tylor a number of times in the book.
Morgan's standard of higher or lower is not clearly expressed. By higher he appears to mean whatever contributes better to control over the environment, victory over competitors, and spread of population. He does not mention Charles Darwin'stheory of evolution, but Darwin referred to Morgan's work in his own.

[edit] The lines of progress

The substitutions of ethna better than the previous follow several lines of progress.
|No. |Line |Ethna |
|I |Subsistence |The arts of subsistence[3] are|
| | |Natural Subsistence upon Fruits and Roots, |
| | |Fish Subsistence, |
| | |Farinaceous Subsistence through Cultivation,|
| | |Meat and Milk Subsistence, |
| | |Unlimited Subsistence through Field Agriculture |
|II |Government ||
|III |Language |The origin of language is:[4] |
| | |Gesture Language using natural symbols. |
| | |Monosyllabical language, the first phase of articulatelanguage.[5] |
| | |Syllabical Language. |
|IV |The Family |The forms of family are[6] |
| | |Consanguine, ... the intermarriage of brothers and sisters....