Ancient Society
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Anthropology and sociology students seeking to understand early theories of social evolution
- History enthusiasts who want a classic analytical framework for ancient social organization
- Social science researchers who need to cite or compare Morgan's original arguments
- Serious readers interested in the origin of kinship systems and private property
Not a good fit for
- General leisure readers looking for a light, accessible introduction
- Readers expecting the latest archaeological evidence and contemporary anthropological consensus
- Readers unaccustomed to nineteenth-century academic prose and extensive ethnographic material
Reading tips
- Read the table of contents and conclusion first to grasp the three-stage structure before going into detail
- Note the sources of ethnographic cases as you read and remain aware of the limits of the evidence
- Read alongside a textbook on the history of anthropological theory to understand the book's scholarly position
- Excerpt key concepts such as gens and phratry to build your own glossary
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Is this book suitable for readers with no background in anthropology?
Does the stage theory of social evolution in this book still hold today?
What are the features of this edition?
Comments
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About the author
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) was an American anthropologist and social theorist. He devoted sustained attention to the social organization and ways of living of Native American peoples; his representative work Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines centers on this subject, examining the relationship between forms of dwelling and family life. His other representative work, Ancient Society, discusses questions of social evolution from the perspectives of social theory and anthropology. Its influence extended beyond anthropology and provided an important reference for later research on social structure and cultural development. Two of his works are included in this collection. Beyond this basic information, public sources are limited, so no further biographical speculation is offered here; the focus is on the themes of his works and their scholarly influence.
