John Ferguson McLennan

John Ferguson McLennan (October 14, 1827 - June 16, 1881), Scottish ethnologist, was born at Inverness.

Life

John Ferguson McLennan was born in Inverness, Scotland on October 14, 1827, to the family of John McLennan, an insurance agent, and his wife, Jessie Ross. McLennan studied at King's College, Aberdeen, where he graduated with distinction in 1849, thence proceeding to Trinity College Cambridge, where he remained until 1855 without taking a degree. He then spent two years in London writing for various periodicals including the Leader.

Returning to Edinburgh, McLennan was called to the Scottish bar in 1857. In 1862, he married Mary Bell McCulloch. They had one daughter. He became secretary of the Scottish Law Amendment Society and in 1871 was appointed parliamentary draughtsman for Scotland, a position he held until 1875. He received an LL. D. degree from the University of Aberdeen in 1874. In 1875, he married for a second time, to Eleonora Anne Brandram.

Although successful in the area of Law, it was McLennan's anthropological writings that were his passion and through which he had the greatest impact. He wrote on topics such as marriage, family, kinship, and related customs. His influential Primitive Marriage (1965) presented a theory of their development in human history from primitive cultures, which, although generally rejected today, had considerable impact on the field for some time. McLennnan's work influenced William Robertson Smith and Sigmund Freud, and he strongly criticized the work of Henry Maine and Lewis Henry Morgan.

Ill-health prevented McLennan from completing much of his work, including a revision of Primitive Marriage. He died of consumption on June 14, 1881 at Hayes Common, Kent, England. His widow and his brother, Donald McLennan, took on the task of publishing his papers to complete his work posthumously.

Work

In 1865 he published Primitive Marriage, in which, arguing from the prevalence of the symbolical form of capture in the marriage ceremonies of primitive races, he developed an intelligible picture of the growth of the marriage relation and of systems of kinship according to natural laws. In 1866 he wrote in the Fortnightly Review (April and May) an essay on Kinship in Ancient Greece, in which he proposed to test by early Greeli facts the theory of the history of kinship set forth in Primitive Marriage; and three years later appeared a series of essays on Totemism in the same periodical for 1869-1870 (the germ of which had been contained in the paper just named), which mark the second great step in his systematic study of early society.

A reprint of Primitive Marriage, with Kinship in Ancient Greece and some other essays not previously published, appeared in 1876, under the title of Studies in Ancient History. The new essays in this volume were mostly critical, but one of them, in which perhaps his guessing talent is seen at its best The Divisions of the Irish Family, is an elaborate discussion of a problem which has long puzzled both Celtic scholars and jurists; and in another, On the Classificatory System of Relationship, he propounded a new explanation of a series of facts which, he thought, might throw light upon the early history of society, at the same time putting to the test of those facts the theories he had set forth in Primitive Marriage. A Paper on The Levirate and Polyandry, following up the line of his previous investigations (Fortnightly Review, 1877), were the last work he was able to publish.

McLennan (1869-1870) suggested that the worship of plants and animals by primitive cultures was the first religion. Functioning as a "totem" a animal, plant, or other object provided deeply symbolic meaning for early social groups. He argued that the entire human race had passed through a totemic stage at some point in the distant past. He theorized that such totemism cemented the clan as the unit of society, particularly in the context of exogamy and matrilineal descent.

In his Totem and Taboo, Freud regarded the totem as the projection of a hypothetical tribe's Oedipal guilt for the murder of their patriarch, and subsequently the lynchpin for their systems of taboos and morality that allegedly developed in the aftermath. Freud credited McLennan for his work on totemism and exogamy:

The credit for having recognized the significance of totemism for the ancient history of man belongs to the Scotchman J. Ferguson McLennan (Fortnightly Review 1869-70). ... McLennan (1865) ingeniously inferred the existence of exogamy from the vestiges of customs that seemed to indicate the earlier practice of marriage by capture. He formed a hypothesis that in the earliest times it had been a general usage for men to obtain their wives from another group and that marriage with a woman of their own group gradually 'came to be considered improper because it was unusual' [ibid., 289]. He accounted for the prevalence of exogamy by supposing that the practice of killing the majority of female children at birth had led to a scarcity of women in primitive societies (Freud 1918).

In his The Patriarchal Theory (1985), McLennan severely criticized Henry Maine's view:

The conclusion we are brought to is that, besides the occurrence of Patria Potestas and Agnation in the Roman family in the historic period, there is really no evidence to show the Patriarchal Family, as Sir Henry Maine has described it, was primal and universal. ... For it has appeared at all points, not only that the phenomena dealt with are not intelligible on the Patriarchal Theory, but that they carry us back to a stage of society prior to the form of the family that had a father at its head, to the stage of polyandry and to the form of the family founded upon kinship through women only.

Besides the works already cited, McLennan wrote a Life of Thomas Drummond (1867). The vast materials which he had accumulated on kinship were edited by his widow and Arthur Platt, under the title Studies in Ancient history: Second Series (1896).

Legacy

It was through McLennan that William Robertson Smith was motivated to study comparative religion and primitive culture, leading to his famous Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia (1885). Smith and McLennan shared common interests and approaches, such that Smith included McLennan's eight stages of social and religious development in his publication. In fact, Smith called McLennan "one of the best friends I ever had" (Bediako 1997). Smith learned from McLennan that religious and social structures in early society were intimately related (Rivière 1995).

McLennan's pioneering work on totems (as survivals of primitive worship of fetishes, plants, animals, and anthropomorphic gods) and his theory of primitive marriage and societal organization had a great influence upon social scientists for a considerable time.

Marriage by capture has a long lineage in anthropological writing and speculation and still appears frequently in modern ethnographic contexts. It was central to John F. McLennan's theory of the origin of exogamy, which linked totemism, female infanticide, exogamy, marriage by capture and polyandry into a single theory. Although his theory has generally been dismissed, it provided the starting point for a considerable body of analytic discussion. It has left its mark even on authors who may not acknowledge it, or even be unaware of it. We may wonder what McLennan would have made of the much more sophisticated ethnography of the present, if he were given the opportunity to test his views on it (Barnes 1999).

Main publications

• McLennan, John Ferguson. [1865] 1970. Primitive Marriage. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226560805
• McLennan, John Ferguson. 1867. Memoir of Thomas Drummond, R.E.,F.R.A.S., Under Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 1835-1840. Edmonston and Douglas.
• McLennan, John Ferguson. 1869-1870, The worship of animal and plants: Totems and totemism Fortnightly Review (6-7).
• McLennan, John Ferguson. 1876. Studies in Ancient History Comprising a Reprint of Primitive Marriage: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Form of Capture in Marriage Ceremonies. London: Bernhard Quaritch.
• McLennan, John Ferguson. [1885] 2006. The Patriarchal Theory. Adamant Media Corporation. ISBN 0543926028
• McLennan, John Ferguson. 1896. Studies in Ancient History The Second Series: Comprising an Inquiry into the Origin of Exogamy. London: MacMillan.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Barnard, Alan. 2000. History and Theory in Anthropology. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521774322
• Barnes, R. H. 1999. Marriage by capture. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5.
• Bediako, Gillian M. 1997. Primal Religion and the Bible: William Robertson Smith and His Heritage. Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 1850756724
• Freud, Sigmund. [1918] 1950. Totem and Taboo. Routledge. ISBN 0710046014
• Rivière, Peter. 1995. William Robertson Smith and John Ferguson McLennan: The Aberdeen roots of British social anthropology. William Johnstone (ed.) William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment, 293-302. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. ISBN 185075523X

External links

• Studies in Ancient History The Second Series: Comprising and Inquiry into the Origin of Exogamy
• Memoir of Thomas Drummond, R.E.,F.R.A.S., Under Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 1835-1840
• John Ferguson McLennan Chambers's Cyclopædia of English Literature
• McLennan, John Ferguson Stephen, Leslie, Sidney Lee, Robert Blake, and Christine Stephanie Nicholls, The Dictionary of National Biography: From the Earliest Times to 1900. Oxford University Press, 1909. Digitized Aug 9, 2007.

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