📚 Primitive Societies

Books with primitive societies on their catalogue record, first published between 1861 and 2016, ordered by how many editions are in print.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject primitive societies in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print, out of the 1,397 works the catalogue holds under that subject. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	Ancient law, its connection with the early history of society and its relaton to modern ideas	Henry James Sumner Maine	1861	166
	Ancient Society (The John Harvard Library)	Lewis Henry Morgan	1877	72
	The mind of primitive man	Franz Boas	1911	66
	Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigenthums und des Staats	Friedrich Engels	1884	65
	Primitive Culture	Edward Burnett Tylor	2010	51
	Primitive culture	Edward B. Tylor	1871	27
	Lectures on the early history of institutions	Henry James Sumner Maine	1875	26
	Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples	Margaret Mead	1911	26
	The sexual life of savages in north-western Melanesia	Bronisław Malinowski	1929	26
	Crime and custom in savage society	Bronisław Malinowski	1926	21
	Facing Mount Kenya	Jomo Kenyatta	1900	20
	Sociologie et anthropologie / par Marcel Mauss. Précédé d'une Introduction à l'oeuvre de Marcel Mauss	Marcel Mauss	1950	20
	Man and his work	Melville J. Herskovitz	1948	19
	Psyche's task	James George Frazer	1909	17
	Social Origins and Primal Law	Andrew Lang	1903	16
	The primitive mind and modern civilization	Charles Roberts Aldrich	1931	16
	Patterns of culture	Ruth Benedict	1934	15
	Nutrition and physical degeneration	Weston A. Price	1938	15
	Pre-historic times, as illustrated by ancient remains, and the manners and customs of modern savages	Sir John Lubbock	1869	14
	The children of the sun	W. J. Perry	1923	14
	Sexual life of primitive people	Hans Fehlinger	1921	13
	Human types	Raymond William Firth	1938	13
	Society and nature	Hans Kelsen	1943	13
	Elements of social organization	Raymond William Firth	1951	13
	Primitive classification	Émile Durkheim	1963	12
	Structures élémentaires de la parenté	Claude Lévi-Strauss	1967	12
	Habitat, economy and society	Cyril Daryll Forde	1934	11
	La pensée sauvage	Claude Lévi-Strauss	1962	11
	Origin of the Family Private Property and the State	Frederick Engels	2016	11
	The people of Alor	Cora Alice Du Bois	1944	10

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 24 Oct 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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