Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics [Paperback]

E. Adamson Hoebel (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0689700962 | ISBN-13: 978-0689700965 | Publication Date: June 1968

A classic work in the anthropology of law, this book offered one of the first ambitiously conceived analyses of the fundamental rights and duties that are treated as law among nonliterate peoples (labeled "primitive" at the time of the original publication). The heart of the book is a description and analysis of the law of five societies: the Eskimo; the Ifugao of northern Luzon in the Philippines; the Comanche, Kiowa, and Cheyenne tribes of the western plains of the United States; the Trobriand Islanders of the southwest Pacific; and the Ashanti of western Africa. Hoebel's lucid analysis reveals the variety and complexity of these societies' political and legal institutions. It emphasizes their use of due process in adjudication and enforcement and highlights the importance of general explicit standards of conduct in these societies. In offering these detailed case studies of societies studied by other anthropologists, and in outlining an influential approach to the subject, it remains an illuminating book for both scholars and students.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

It will undoubtedly take its place as the indispensable account-rendered of work to date on primitive legal culture...The work is indispensable to all serious students of law in society, but it is to be hoped that even those lawyers whose interests are of a more practical cast may find in it the means of lengthened perspective on the daily job and of the beginning or heightening of that wisdom in matters human which is offered by the science of man.
--Charles L. Black, Jr. (Columbia Law Review 19550501)

A wealth of stimulating ideas is offered in the book...This work is bound to become the textbook of primitive law for future generations of students of both social anthropology and jurisprudence.
--Leonhard Adams (Yale Law Journal 19550701)

Hoebel not only engages in an exhaustive and lucid analysis of the legal system of each of his sample societies, but in addition does a magnificent job of distilling from each system a set of 'jural postulates' on which it appears to be based...Hoebel has done a great number of things well and has raised an impressive number of new and fascinating questions, as well as renewing some questions which have been neglected in anthropology since the nineteenth century. He has not solved all the problems of comparative jurisprudence, but he has probably done something much more valuable in writing one of the most genuinely stimulating anthropological books of the past ten years.
--C. W. M. Hart (American Anthropologist 19560601)

The present volume is the first really satisfactory book on the law-ways of non-literate peoples in any language...The analysis of the law-ways of the seven different peoples is both fascinating and instructive, and the final chapters on law and society, the interrelations between religion, magic and law, the functions of the law, and the trend of the law, will be of interest to layman and student alike.
--Ashley Montagu (Isis 19551201)

To most lawyers legal ethnology has remained an obscure and, therefore, useless subject. This was attributable to the lack of a treatise on legal ethnology, more particularly, a treatise understandable by the law-trained man...The gap has now been filled. Only one man in America was qualified to do the job properly: E. Adamson Hoebel...The book presents a wealth of findings concerning the emergence and purpose of particular legal rules...He has attacked a most difficult problem, and he has conquered it well. The book will be regarded as a pioneer work of ethnological jurisprudence, and it will be remembered as one of the best pieces of American legal realism.
--Gerhard O. W. Mueller (Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 19550901)

Professor Hoebel's volume is the most thorough study of primitive law that we now possess. His attitude is rigorously behavioristic and empirical, and he thus rejects the traditional natural law approach as well as Austinianism and Kelsenism. He accepts the idea of the superorganic, but his main point of departure is in terms of the recognized values of a culture...In the selection of the five cultures he has chosen for analysis Professor Hoebel begins with the rudimentary law of the anarchic Eskimo, passes to the private law of the Ifugao, studies next the law of the plains Indians, rebuts Malinowski's theory of the law of the Trobriand Islanders, and concludes with an account of Ashanti law, a people on the threshold of civilization, i.e., their culture was advanced but they had not yet invented writing...His book is an admirable study of a difficult subject.
--Huntington Cairns (Journal of Politics 19560801)

This is the best general discussion we have of primitive law... Anthropologists and lawyers alike have raised clouds of dust in their handling of the relations of religion, magic, and law. Hoebel's excellent treatment of the variable nature of these relations should lay the dust...Hoebel is very conscious of law as sometimes 'making society' rather than merely reflecting it.
--Irving Kaplan (American Journal of Sociology 19560101)

The Law of Primitive Man is a first-rate comparative study of the law and its development--the best thing of its kind...The book will undoubtedly become a classic in the field of sociology of law.
--Everett C. Hughes (Stanford Law Review 19550501) --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

About the Author

E. Adamson Hoebel (1925–1983) was Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, and author of The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Scribner (June 1968)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0689700962
• ISBN-13: 978-0689700965
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,441,964 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Real-life examples makes this a useful book, October 22, 2010

By 

J. Murray (Laguna Hills, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics (Paperback)

I have a long-standing passion for early man. He is my ancestor. He laid the foundation for what we as Modern Man accomplishes. How did he survive in a feral world where his skin was too thin (unlike the rhino) and his teeth too dull (unlike the sabertooth)? What was his magic tool? To answer these questions, I read the entire Aliso Viejo CA library on prehistoric man. I have a good idea how we made it through the Plio-Pleistocene, evolved from Homo habilis to become the workhorse of the human species--Homo erectus.

Erectus was a man's man with his thick skull (from being beaten about the head too often, paleoanthropologists speculate) and his advanced tools (Acheulian by then). As I studied his world (he survived longer than any other human species to date), I hoped to find the beginnings of religion, culture, music, why we decorate our bodies with jewelry and paint.

And where did our acceptance of laws come from?

Much has been written about the seeds of religion, music, jewelry, but not the beginnings of jurisprudence. Why do we voluntarily submit ourselves to the subjective rule of another? We allow ourselves to be ostracized jailed. We change our behavior to suit laws that are grounded only in the geography in which we live. I read everything I could find about modern primitive people, but there aren't many left. Man has civilized most of our globe and few isolated cultural groups remain. In the days of Margaret Meade, anthropologists studied many groups of primitive men--the Bunyoro, the Yanomamo, the Dinka--but within a hundred years, most of the tribes had disappeared.

Possibly the last comprehensive study (to my knowledge, though I am not a trained anthropologist) was done by E. Adamson Hoebel and his ambitious survey of five cultural tribes in The Law of Primitive Man (by 'primitive' he means 'non-literate' man). He starts with an overview of primitive law, discussing its cultural background, his methods of studying the tribes and the fundamental legal concepts he applied in the study of primitive law. His subjects are the Eskimo, the iFugao, the Comanche/Kiowa/Cheyenne, the Trobriand Islanders and the Ashanti. I knew what I was in for with this treatise when it took Hoebel eleven pages to define law as A social norm is legal if its neglect or infraction is regularly met, in threat or in fact, by the application of physical force by an individual or group possessing the socially recognized privilege of so acting.

Hoebel develops his study via a discussion of each society. As you red my notes, remember that the book was written in 1936.

* Eskimos lived in groups of about one hundred, which not surprisingly is also the group size paleo-anthropologists speculate that Homo erectus lived. It is considered the right size community for intimate face-to-face interactions, allows for a high degree of uniformity of their culture and language
* They believe in the supernatural, though admit they don't understand it and are content to not understand it
* They have nine postulates that underlie their society, beliefs such as
o life is hard and the margin of safety small
o all natural resources are free or common goods
o unproductive members of society cannot be supported
* Apprehension of unpredictable misfortune drives Eskimos to believe they are caused by spirits
* Magic and religion rather than law direct most of their actions
* Much of Eskimo law is communicated by Hoebel via examples. For example, an irritable foster-father declared to his adopted son that he wished the boy were dead. That the boy was not worth the food he ate. The youth declared he would never eat again. That night he went out naked into the snow, lay down and froze to deat
* The IFugao have a similar set of postulates, including
o the bilateral kinship group is the primary social and legal unit, consisting of the dead, the living and the yet-unborn
o an individual's responsibility to his kinship group takes precedence over any self-interest
o the kinship group shall control all basic capital goods and provide protection for its members and punish outside aggression against them
o Capital goods may be lent at interest
o A debt never dies
o Rice is the one good food

By the time I finished reading the legal details of five tribes, their rationale, their unwritten rules, their easy mix of objective and subjective, I had a nascent understanding of how our earliest ancestors might have determined their laws and why. It amazes me how much time and effort Hoebel put into this research, into synthesizing the details, into sifting through the disparate threads of their culture to come to his conclusions. That thought process is arguably as fascinating as his conclusions. On balance, I recommend this book to anyone with a curiosity about our roots and how we've ended up where we are today.