Originally published in 1964 by the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, this book is a compilation of the ethnographic data on the seventeenth-century Huron Indians contained in The Je suit Relations and in the writings of Samuel de Champlain and Gabriel Sagard. This study of the Hurons, who lived in the present province of Ontario, Canada, spans the period from 1615 to 1649, when they were defeated and dispersed by the Iroquois. Topics covered include dress, modes of travel, trade, war, sociopolitical organization, subsistence activities, and religious beliefs and practices. The book is invaluable for indicating the cultural similarities and differences between the Hurons and the neighboring Northern Iroquoian cultures and for documenting evidence of cultural change. This first paperback edition also includes a new introduction by the author, in which she brings her work up to date by surveying developments in the study of the Huron ethnography between 1964 and the present.

Modern anthropology would be radically different without this book. Published in 1871, this first major study of kinship, inventive and wide-ranging, created a new field of inquiry in anthropology. Drawing partly upon his own fieldwork among American Indians, anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan examined the kinship systems of over one hundred cultures, probing for similarities and differences in their organization. In his attempt to discover particular types of marriage and descent systems across the globe, Morgan demonstrated the centrality of kinship relations in many cultures. Kinship, it was revealed, was an important key for understanding cultures and could be studied through systematic, scientific means. Anthropologists continue to wrestle with the premises, methodology, and conclusions of "Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity." Scholars such as W. H. R. Rivers, Robert Lowie, Meyer Fortes, Fred Eggan, and Claude Levi-Strauss have acknowledged their intellectual debt to this study; those less sympathetic to Morgan's treatment of kinship nonetheless do not question its historical significance and impact on the development of modern anthropology.

The Midwinter ceremonial -- the longest and most complex of the rituals of the Longhouse religion -- is examined here in three parts. Following a short cultural history of the Iroquois and a description of the present geographical location of the various longhouses and tribes, Elisabeth Tooker discusses the principles of Iroquois ritualism.

The second part of the book is devoted to detailed accounts of the Midwinter ceremonial as it is performed today at six Iroquois longhouses. The third part presents the historical perspective of the ceremony through excerpts from writings of Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries, captives, travelers, local residents, and anthropologists.