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The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics
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About The Law Of Primitive Man: A Study In Comparative
Product Description 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. 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 1955-05-01) 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 1955-07-01) 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 1956-06-01) 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 1955-12-01) 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 1955-09-01) 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 Austini
