6(a) What is acclimatization ? Discuss adaptive responses to high altitude and cold climate.
20 Marks
Syllabus: Paper I > 9.7 Man's physiological responses to environmental stresses
Lewis Morgan’s Classification of Family — 2021 Paper I
Question · 2021 · Paper I · 15 Marks
Critically evaluate Lewis Morgan's classification of family.
Model Answer
VAID ICSApproach
- Demand of Question: Explain Morgan’s evolutionary classification of family and critically assess its validity.
- Structuring the Response: Intellectual background → five family forms → basis of sequence → contributions → criticisms.
- Key Dimensions to Cover: Systems of Consanguinity (1871), Ancient Society (1877), classificatory terminology, unilinear evolution, speculative reconstruction.
Model Answer
Introduction
Lewis Henry Morgan, pioneer of anthropological kinship studies, attempted to reconstruct the evolution of family and marriage through comparative kinship terminology. In Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family (1871) and especially Ancient Society (1877), he proposed that the family evolved progressively from loosely regulated sexual relations towards monogamy.
Morgan’s Classification of Family
Morgan distinguished five successive forms in Ancient Society:
| Family Form | Characteristics |
| Consanguine Family | Group marriage between brothers and sisters, own and collateral |
| Punaluan Family | Group marriage, but brother–sister unions excluded |
| Syndyasmian/Pairing Family | Marriage between single pairs, but relatively unstable and non-exclusive |
| Patriarchal Family | One man with several wives; strong paternal authority |
| Monogamian Family | Exclusive union of one man and one woman; relatively stable family |
Morgan also envisaged an earlier condition of promiscuity preceding organised family forms. He associated the consanguine and punaluan families largely with “savagery,” pairing families with “barbarism,” and monogamy with later barbarism and civilisation.
Basis of Morgan’s Reconstruction
Morgan inferred earlier family forms principally from systems of kinship terminology.
For example:
Malayan terminology → Consanguine family
Turanian/Ganowanian terminology → Punaluan family
Aryan/Semitic/Uralian terminology → Monogamian family
He believed terminologies were survivals reflecting earlier forms of marriage and family organisation.
Contribution
- Morgan made kinship and family legitimate subjects of systematic anthropological comparison.
- He recognised that family is historically variable, not an immutable universal form.
- His distinction between classificatory and descriptive kinship terminology stimulated later studies by Rivers, Radcliffe-Brown and Lévi-Strauss.
- Ancient Society represented an early attempt to relate family, property, technology and social organisation within an evolutionary framework.
Critical Evaluation
- Speculative reconstruction: The sequence was constructed largely through inferred survivals rather than direct historical evidence.
- Lack of ethnographic support: Later ethnographic data have not substantiated universal stages of consanguine family or group marriage.
- Unilinear evolutionism: Morgan assumed all societies travelled broadly along one sequence culminating in monogamy, underestimating multiple historical trajectories.
- Kin terminology ≠ marriage history: Similar kin terms need not prove the prior existence of particular forms of group marriage.
- Ethnocentric hierarchy: Treating monogamous “civilised” family as the culmination of evolution reflected nineteenth-century evolutionary assumptions.
Conclusion
Morgan’s specific evolutionary sequence is therefore historically obsolete, but his comparative analysis transformed kinship into a central anthropological field. His lasting contribution lies less in the validity of the five-stage sequence than in recognising the diversity and historical transformation of family and kinship systems.
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UPSC Anthropology Optional 2021 — Paper I
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