ABSTRACT
Primitive society was initially regarded as a subject for lawyers. The founding father of British anthropology, E. B. Tylor, commented in 1865 that the investigation of questions such as the form of primitive marriage ‘belongs properly to that interesting, but difficult and almost unworked subject, the Comparative Jurisprudence of the lower races, and no one not versed in Civil Law could do it justice’.1The pioneering studies were written by lawyers – Henry Maine, Johannes Bachofen, J. F. McLennan, Lewis Henry Morgan. The issues that they investigated – the development of marriage and the family, of private property and the state – were conceived of in legal terms. Their initial source, their common case-study, was provided by Roman law.
