John Ferguson McLennan

John Ferguson McLennan (1827 to 1881) was a Scottish advocate, social anthropologist and ethnologist, born in Inverness. He studied at King's College, Aberdeen and at Trinity College, Cambridge, wrote for London periodicals, was called to the Scottish bar in 1857 and later served as parliamentary draughtsman for Scotland. His Primitive Marriage (1865) argued from symbolic and ceremonial forms of bride capture and developed, from ethnographic data, a social evolutionist theory of marriage and of kinship according to natural laws, rejecting patriarchal society as an early stage. He proposed an early model of a mainly male war band practising female infanticide, with promiscuity and matrilineality as salient features. In The Worship of Animals and Plants (1869 to 1870) he suggested a connection between social structures and early religion and coined the word totemism, which later scholars including William Robertson Smith and Émile Durkheim found useful. His comparative method, which treated the most archaic as the nearest to the beginning of human progress, shaped the work of Robertson Smith. He died of tuberculosis at Hayes Common, Kent, in 1881.