Anthropology began as archeology—not just the archaeology of “prehistoric” human or quasi-human bones and stones, but also the study of other things presumably archaic. The most notable of these was the social life and thought of the world’s remaining peoples who could be taken as proxies for those who supplied these bones and used these stones as tools. Although the legitimacy of this surrogacy has been questioned in the history of the discipline, it remains strong today, even in popular discourse: witness the attraction of images of “cavemen,” people “from the Stone Age,” and, especially as part of “radical” feminist theory, “matriarchy.”
Anthropology, at least in America, also began as ideas about “primitive” kinship, mostly through the Herculean efforts of Victorian-era scholar Lewis Henry Morgan.1Morgan’s main interest was once the most prestigious—and most seemingly arcane—area of anthropological research
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