Meyer Fortes

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Meyer Fortes

Meyer Fortes (1906-1983) was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi

Tallensi

The Tallensi are a tribe people of northern Ghana, numbering a few tens of thousands. They speak Talni language, a language or dialect of the Gur languages branch of the Niger-Congo languages family, and maintain an agriculture mode of subsistence....
and Ashanti in Ghana

Ghana

The Republic of Ghana is a country in West Africa. It borders C?te d'Ivoire to the west, Burkina Faso to the north, Togo to the east, and the Gulf of Guinea to the south....
.

Originally trained in psychology

Psychology

Psychology is an academic and applied science discipline involving the science study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally it also relies on symbolic hermeneutics and critical theory, although these traditions are less pronounced than in other social sciences such as sociology....
, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship

Kinship

Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin, through either biological, cultural, or historical descent. In anthropology the kinship system includes people related both by descent and marriage, while usage in biology includes descent and mating....
, the family, and ancestor worship

Ancestor worship

Ancestor worship or ancestor veneration is a practice based on the belief that deceased family members have a continued existence, take an interest in the affairs of the world, and/or possess the ability to influence the fortune of the living....
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

Ethnology

Ethnology is the branch of anthropology that compares and analyzes the origins, distribution, technology, religion, language, and social structure of the ethnicity, Race , and/or national divisions of humanity....
.

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Encyclopedia

Meyer Fortes (1906-1983) was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi

Tallensi

Ghana

Psychology

Kinship

Ancestor worship

Ethnology

First Born

First Born is a United Kingdom television serial produced by the BBC in 1988.Charles Dance starred as genetic researcher Edward Forester, whose work leads him to create a man-gorilla hybrid, using his own spermatozoon and cells taken from a female gorilla....
, kingship, and divination

Divination

Divination is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of a standardized process or ritual. Diviners ascertain their interpretations of how a querent should proceed by reading signs, events, or omens, or through alleged contact with a supernatural agency....
.

Fortes received his anthropological training from Charles Gabriel Seligman

Charles Gabriel Seligman

Charles Gabriel Seligman was a United Kingdom ethnologist. Born in London, Seligman studied medicine at St. Thomas' Hospital.After several years as a physician, Seligman joined an 1898 University of Cambridge expedition to the Torres Strait....
at the London School of Economics

London School of Economics

The London School of Economics and Political Science, more commonly referred to as The London School of Economics or LSE, is a specialist college of the University of London in London, England....
. Fortes also trained with Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski was a Poles anthropology widely considered to be one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century because of his pioneering work on ethnography fieldwork, with which he also gave a major contribution to the study of Melanesia, and the study of Reciprocity ....
and Raymond Firth

Raymond Firth

Sir Raymond William Firth, New Zealand Order of Merit, British Academy, was an ethnologist from New Zealand. As a result of Firth's ethnographic work, actual behaviour of societies is separated from the idealized rules of behaviour within the particular society ....
. Along with contemporaries A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Sir Edmund Leach

Edmund Leach

Sir Edmund Ronald Leach was a United Kingdom Social Anthropology.He was provost of King's College, Cambridge from 1966-1979, was made a Fellow of the British Academy in 1972 and knighted in 1975....
, Audrey Richards

Audrey Richards

Audrey Isabel Richards , was a pioneering British woman social anthropologist who worked mainly in sub-Saharan Africa.Audrey was the second of four girls born to a well-connected family in London, England....
, and Lucy Mair

Lucy Mair

Lucy Philip Mair was a British anthropologist. She wrote on the subject of social organization, and contributed to the involvement of anthropological research in governance and politics....
, Fortes held strong functionalist views that insisted upon empirical evidence in order to generate analyses of society. His volume with E. E. Evans-Pritchard

E. E. Evans-Pritchard

Sir Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard was a United Kingdom anthropology instrumental in the development of Social Anthropology in that country. He was professor of social anthropology at Oxford from 1946 to 1970....
, African Political Systems (1940) established the principles of segmentation and balanced opposition, which were to become the hallmarks of African political anthropology. Despite his work in Francophone West Africa, Fortes' work on political systems was influential to other British anthropologists, especially Max Gluckman

Max Gluckman

Max Gluckman was a South African-born Great Britain Social anthropology.He grew up in South Africa, working later under the British Administration in Northern Rhodesia ....
and played a role in shaping what became known as the Manchester School

Manchester school

Manchester school may refer to:* Manchester capitalism, a socio-economic and political movement of the 19th century* The Manchester School , an academic journal of economics...
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

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge , located in Cambridge, England, is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation university in the Anglosphere....
.

In 1963, Fortes delivered the inaugural Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the University of Rochester

University of Rochester

The University of Rochester is a private university, nonsectarian, research university located in Rochester, New York. The university grants undergraduate, graduate, doctoral, and professional degrees through six schools and various interdisciplinary programs....
, considered by many to be the most important annual lecture series in the field of Anthropology.

Selected Bibliography

1940. African Political Systems (editor, with E. E. Evans-Pritchard). London and New York: International African Institute.
1945. The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi.
1959. The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi.
1959. Oedipus and Job in West African Religion.
1969. Kinship and the Social Order.
1970. Time and Social Structure.
1970. Social Structure (editor).
1983. Rules and the Emergence of Society.

Meyer Fortes

Selected Bibliography

External links