Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family is an 1871 book written by Lewis Henry Morgan (1818 - 1881) and published by the Smithsonian Institution. It is considered foundational for the discipline of anthropology and particularly for the study of human kinship. It was the culmination of decades of research into the variety of kinship terminologies in the world conducted partly through fieldwork and partly through a global survey of kinship terminologies in the languages and cultures of the world.
It "created at a stroke what without exaggeration might be called the seminal concern of contemporary anthropology, the study of kinship..." In the book Morgan argues that all human societies share a basic set of principles for social organization along kinship lines, based on the principles of consanguinity (kinship by blood) and affinity (kinship by marriage). At the same time, he presented a sophisticated schema of social evolution based upon the relationship terms, the categories of kinship, used by peoples around the world. Through his analysis of kinship terms, Morgan discerned that the structure of the family and social institutions develop and change according to a specific sequence.
Research
Morgan's interest in kinship systems came from his interest in the history and society of the Iroquois league, particularly the Seneca which he knew well. Studying Iroquois social organization, he discovered their matrilineal system of kinship reckoning, and this was what spurred his interests in kinship terminology. The Iroquoian kinship system used the same kin terms for all male blood relatives on the father's side (i.e., a father's brother is mentioned with the same term as father), and all female blood relatives on the mother's side (i.e., mother's sisters are mentioned with the same term as mother). This is a system later called "bifurcate merging" or Iroquoian kinship following Morgan. Having discovered that the typical European way of organizing kin relations was not universal, Morgan came to suspect that other languages in the Americas and perhaps in Asia had similar systems and began an investigation.
For the languages in Africa, Asia and Australia he relied on a survey administered through correspondence with missionaries. The questionnaire or "schedule" that Morgan used when he could not personally investigate, inquired about the terms for some 200 kin relations, for example "father's brother", "father's sister's son", etc.
Morgan also collected extensive data himself through fieldwork among Native American groups. In the consecutive summers from 1859 to 1862 Morgan traveled to the Midwest to collect kinship terminologies among the Indians there. He did not live in the Indian communities, but traveled around interviewing all Indians he encountered about their customs and kinship terms. The American Indian Wars were raging at the time, making the Western territories a dangerous place to travel. The first and second trips were to the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, and the third to Fort Garry, Winnipeg. On the fourth trip he traveled over 2,000 miles up the Missouri River to Fort Benton, Montana. Upon reaching Sioux City at the end of his 1862 field season he learned that his daughters Mary and Helen Morgan (2 and 6 years old respectively) had died of scarlet fever almost a month earlier. This devastated him and led him to forgo additional fieldwork.
Publication
Morgan turned in the final manuscript in 1867, but the book was long delayed in publication. Moreover, due to publication costs its final published forms were shorter than Morgan wanted. The delay was due to the book's undergoing two rounds of peer review, a precaution taken by the agent of publisher Joseph Henry whose Smithsonian Institution was heavily invested in the publication.
Henry worried about the size of the manuscript, and he repeatedly asked Morgan to trim the manuscript by organizing the material better and getting rid of redundancies. At 600 pages the costs neared 8000 dollars, and at 16 dollars per page of stereotype, it was the most expensive work ever published by the Smithsonian Institution.
Waiting for publication was highly stressful for Morgan, who feared that someone else would be the first to publish the evolutionary scheme that he considered his main intellectual contribution. Overall, Morgan was not pleased with Henry's editorship, and he considered his demands of peer review and many rounds of revisions to be excessive. Morgan, a lawyer by profession, estimated that the effort of researching, writing, and producing the book cost him 25,000 dollars in expenses and lost profits.