Mark Osipovich Kosven
Kosven, Mark Osipovich
Born Jan. 11 (23), 1885, in Brest; died June 18, 1967, in Moscow. Soviet ethnographer, historian of primitive society, and specialist on the Caucasus. Doctor of historical sciences (1943).
From 1934 to 1954 Kosven was a professor at Moscow University. From 1935 to 1937 and from 1943 to 1965 he was a senior research worker at the Institute of Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. His main areas of research were the matriarchy, the patriarchy, early forms of marriage, the family community and patronymic groups, the historiography of primitive history, and the history of the ethnographic study of the Caucasus.