Meyer Fortes
Meyer Fortes (born April 25, 1906 – died January 27, 1983) was a South African social anthropologist, best known for his study on kinship, family, and religious beliefs of the Tallensi and Ashanti people in Ghana.
Life
Mayer Fortes was born in Britstown, Cape Province, in South Africa. After completing his Masters degree from the University of Cape Town in 1926, he went on to study at the London School of Economics and Political Science at the University of London, where he received his PhD in psychology in 1930. In 1932 he however found new interest in anthropology, the field he remains the most famous in. Fortes received his anthropological training from Charles Gabriel Seligman, and was also trained by Bronislaw Malinowski and Raymond Firth. He specialized in African social structures and from 1934 to 1937 participated in numerous field studies of Tallensi and Ashanti peoples in Ghana
Fortes spent much of his career at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. He was a reader in social anthropology at Oxford from 1946 to 1950, and then was appointed a director of the Anthropology Department of Cambridge University, England, in 1950, carrying this duty until 1973. At the same time he was a professor of social anthropology at King’s College in Cambridge.
Fortes died n 1983.
Work
Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship, setting a standard for studies on African social organization. His famous book, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1959), fused his two interests and set a standard for comparative ethnology. Most of his research was done in nations along the Guinea coast of Africa, but his study of Ashanti and Tallensi established Fortes as the authority in social anthropology. In his two books The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi (1945) and The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi (1949) he writes about the religions of the peoples of the Upper Volta of Ghana, especially underlining the worship of ancestors and the role it plays in people’s everyday life – marriage, family and tribal organization, etc. In addition, Fortes explicitly compared his own religious background of Judaism with the religion of Tallensi people, founding numerous parallels between the two – importance of the first-born, piety, respect for age, value of kinship, etc.
Along with contemporaries A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Sir Edmund Leach, Audrey Richards, and Lucy Mair, Fortes held strong functionalist views that insisted upon empirical evidence in order to generate analyses of society. His monographs on studies on Tallensi and Ashanti laid the foundations for the theory of descent, which became the base of the "structural-functionalism" that dominated social anthropology of the 1950s and 60s. Fortes believed that social institutions, like family or tribe, were the building blocks of the society and the key to maintain the harmony of the social whole. Through studying those institutions, especially their political and economical development, one can understand the development of the society as the whole. The concepts of kinship and lineage are among the most crucial to start with.
His volume with E. E. Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems (1940) established the principles of segmentation and balanced opposition, which were to become the hallmarks of African political anthropology.
Legacy
Despite his work in French-speaking West Africa and numerous books published in French language, Fortes was enormously respected in Anglo-Saxon world. His work on political systems was influential to other British anthropologists, especially Max Gluckman and played a role in shaping what became known as the Manchester School of Social Anthropology, which emphasized the problems of working in colonial Central Africa.
Bibliography
- Fortes, Meyer. 1936. Ritual festivals and social cohesion in the hinterland of the Gold Coast. American anthropologist. 38, 590-604
- Fortes, Meyer (ed.). 1949. Social structure: studies presented to A.R. Radcliffe-Brown. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Fortes, Meyer. 1949. The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi. London: Oxford University Press
- Fortes, Meyer. 1953. The structure of unilineal descent groups. American anthropologist, 55, 17-41
- Fortes, Meyer. 1959. Oedipus and Job in West African religion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Fortes, Meyer. 1963. Ritual and office in tribal society. In Max Gluckman (ed.) Essays on the ritual of social relations (pp. 53-88). Manchester: Manchester University Press
- Fortes, Meyer. 1967. (original from 1945). The dynamics of clanship among the Tallensi: being the first part of an analysis of the social structure of a Trans-Volta tribe. London : Oxford University Press
- Fortes, Meyer. 1970. Time and social structure, and other essays. New York: Berg Publishers. ISBN 1845206495
- Fortes, Meyer. 1972. (original work from 1962). Marriage in tribal societies. London : Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 0521084067
- Fortes, Meyer. 1973. On the concept of the person among the Tallensi. In G. Dieterlen (ed.). La notion de personne en Afrique Noire, (pp. 283-319). Paris: Ed. du Centre national de la recherche scientifique.
- Fortes, Meyer. 1975. Strangers. In Meyer Fortes and Sheila Patterson (eds.). Studies in African social anthropology,(pp. 229-253). London: Academic Press
- Fortes, Meyer. 1978. An anthropologist's apprenticeship. Annual review of anthropology, 7, 1-30
- Fortes, Meyer. 1983. Problems of identity and person. In Anita Jacobson-Widding (ed.) Identity: personal and socio-cultural: A symposium, (pp. 389-401). New Jersey: Atlantic Highlands. ISBN 9155415008
- Fortes, Meyer. 1987. Religion, morality and the person: Essays on Tallensi religion. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press. ISBN 0521336937
- Fortes, Meyer. 2005. (original from 1969). Kinship and the social order: the legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Aldine Transaction. ISBN 0202308022
- Fortes, Meyer & E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds.). 1994. (original work from 1940). African political systems. Kegan Paul International Ltd. ISBN 0710302452
- Fortes, Meyer & Doris Y. Mayer. 1966. Psychosis and social change among the Tallensi of Northern Ghana. Cahiers d'études africaines, 6, 5-40
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Hatch, Elvin. 1974. Theories of Man & Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231036396
- Kuper, Adam. 1983. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London: Routledge. ISBN 0710094094
External links
- The Manchester School – The history of Manchester school of thought
- Meyer Fortes - Brief Biography
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