John Ferguson McLennan

Scottish lawyer and ethnologist

John Ferguson McLennan FRSE LLD (14 October 1827 – 16 June 1881), was a Scottish advocate, social anthropologist and ethnologist.

He was born in Inverness, the son of John McLennan, an insurance agent, and his wife, Jessie Ross. He was educated in that city, then studied law at King's College, Aberdeen, graduating M. A. in 1849. He then entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where in 1853 he obtained a Wrangler's place (first class) in the Mathematical Tripos. He left Cambridge without taking a degree there. McLennan then spent two years in London writing for The Leader, at that time edited by George Henry Lewes, and other periodicals. He may well have attended one of the Inns of Court. During this period he knew George Eliot and William Michael Rossetti, and dabbled in verse in the Pre Raphaelite style. On returning to Edinburgh, he was called to the Scottish bar in January 1857. He became secretary to the Scottish Law Amendment Society, and took an active part in the agitation which led to the Court of Session Act of 1868. As a man of letters, he worked with Alexander Smith. In 1870 McLennan's first wife died, and he moved back to London. In 1871, he took the post of parliamentary draughtsman for Scotland. His health, however, was already thoroughly undermined by tuberculosis (or consumption), and while wintering in Algeria he suffered from repeated attacks of malarial fever. He died of tuberculosis on 16 June 1881 at Hayes Common, Kent.

McLennan undertook the article on "Law" for the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. It looked back to the Scottish tradition of Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith;

In 1865, McLennan published Primitive Marriage. In it he argued from symbolic and ceremonial forms of bride kidnapping (see also Types of marriage). His ideas had been partially anticipated by Johann Jakob Bachofen, writing in 1861 on matriarchy, but were independent. McLennan developed from ethnographic data a social evolutionist theory of marriage, and also of systems of kinship according to natural laws. He rejected patriarchal society as an early stage, arguing in favour of agnation as a more basic evolutionary point; he proposed an early model of social groups, a war band mainly male, practicing female infanticide and acquiring female sexual partners, with promiscuity and matrilineality salient features. of the Encyclopedia Britannica, 1911 edition.

McLennan's work had implications for the field of history of religion. In the study The Worship of Animals and Plants (two parts, 1869–70) McLennan suggested a connection between social structures and primitive religions; and he coined the word "totemism" for the social function of primitive religion. This concise term proved to be useful to later historians of religion, and sociologists like William Robertson Smith and Émile Durkheim (among others). The following quote by McLennan (1865) contains the basic premise for the comparative method (as used by Robertson Smith):
In the sciences of law and society, old means not old in chronology, but in the structure: that is most archaic which lies nearest to the beginning of human progress considered as a development, and that is most modern which is farthest removed from the beginning. For Robertson Smith, McLennan's comparative method proved to be important. One of Robertson Smith's more influential essays, Animal Worship and Animal Tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament, directly follows MacLennan's ideas on totemism. It connected contemporary Arab nomads and ancient biblical peoples with the social function of totemism in primitive religions.