National Appropriations and Cultural Evolution: The Spatial and Temporal US of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Native America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Lewis Henry Morgan (1818–1881) is remembered today primarily as a marginal nineteenth-century ethnologist, whose contribution to anthropology was limited to the inception of kinship studies. Other than that, Morgan is remembered—often ironically—as a “friend of the Indian,” a title he had wished to earn by intermingling his interest in Native American cultures with philanthropic intentions, and as a somewhat delusional amateur, whose evolutionist thought was strongly criticized by Franz Boas (1858–1942). The first US scholar to direct dissertations in anthropology and a major force in the field’s professionalization, Boas promoted the idea of cultural relativism by refuting previous theories—including Morgan’s—that emphasized a unified evolutionary scale on which all cultures could be ordered. While Boas has been constituted as the father of American anthropology, Morgan eventually became an obscure figure, locked in an old box of refuted theories and bad science. Still, some Morgan scholars claim that he should be regarded as a pioneer of American anthropology.1 My analysis in this paper is not aimed at redeeming Morgan’s theories or status. I am interested in his efforts to create a coherent sense of national existence rooted in colonized space, as I believe that these processes have broad implications for understanding the tensions between colonialism and nationalism in US culture. I argue that Morgan appropriated Native American cultures and subordinated them to an evolutionary framework, in order to naturalize US culture and root it in the colonized space of what has been called “America.”
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".