Meyer Fortes
South African-born anthropologist Meyer Fortes (1906-1983) is best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana. 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. He also wrote extensively on issues of the first born, kingship, and divination.
Fortes received his anthropological training from Charles Gabriel Seligman at the London School of Economics. Fortes also trained with Bronislaw Malinowski and Raymond Firth. 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 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 anthopology. Despite his work in Francophone West Africa, Fortes' 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. Fortes spent much of his career as a Reader at the University of Cambridge.
External links
- Functionalism
- The Manchester School
- Lecture and discussion by Meyer Fortes, chaired by Jack Goody, in the Audio Visual Aids centre. (this file is an hour of AV, it takes a really long time to load; a short extract can be found at http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/ancestors/fortes.html
- Brief Biography
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