Meyer Fortes

Meyer Fortes (born April 25, 1906 – died January 27, 1983) was a South African social anthropologist, best known for his studies on kinship, family, and religious beliefs of the Tallensi and Ashanti people in Ghana. He was influential in developing comparative ethnology, particularly with regard to the religious aspects of different cultures. Through objective comparisons between his own Judaism and the religious beliefs of the African tribes he studied, Fortes found numerous similarities. As a trained psychologist and anthropologist, his work focused on the role of religious beliefs in social structures and behavior, not on doctrinal issues. In this way his work is a valuable contribution to our understanding of universal common values, supporting the development of harmonious relationships among all people.

Life

Meyer Fortes was born on April 25, 1906 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 Ph.D. in psychology in 1930.

In 1932, however, he found a new interest in anthropology, receiving his anthropological training from Charles Gabriel Seligman, also studying under 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, 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 in January of 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 the standard for studies on African social organization. His famous book, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1959), fused his two interests making a significant contribution to comparative ethnology.

Most of Fortes' research was done in nations along the Guinea coast of Africa, but his study of the Ashanti and Tallensi established him 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) Fortes wrote 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—particularly in marriage, family, and tribal organization. In addition, Fortes explicitly compared his own religious background of Judaism with the religion of the Tallensi people, finding numerous parallels between the two, such as the importance of the first-born, filial piety, respect for age, value of kinship.

Along with contemporaries Radcliffe-Brown, Edmund Leach, Audrey Richards, and Lucy Mair, Fortes held strong views that insisted upon empirical evidence in order to generate analyses of society. His monographs on studies on the Tallensi and Ashanti laid the foundations for the theory of descent. This formed the basis of the "structural-functionalism" that dominated social anthropology in the 1950s and 1960s.

Fortes contended that social institutions, like family or tribe, were the building blocks of society and the key to maintaining the harmony of the social whole. Through studying those institutions, especially their political and economic development, he believed that one could understand the development of the society as a whole.

Fortes also collaborated with E. E. Evans-Pritchard on the volume African Political Systems (1940), which established the principles of segmentation and balanced opposition. These principles became the hallmark of African political anthropology.

Legacy

Despite his work in French-speaking West Africa and numerous books published in the French language, Fortes was greatly respected in the Anglo-Saxon world. His work on political systems exerted great influence on other British anthropologists. Through the work of Max Gluckman, Fortes' work 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.

Publications

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

References
ISBN 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

Functionalism
The Manchester School – The history of Manchester school of thought
Meyer Fortes - Brief Biography

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