Meyer Fortes

Meyer Fortes ( born April 25, 1906 in Brit Town, Cape Colony (South Africa ); † January 27, 1983 in Cambridge, UK ) was a born South African anthropologist who is known for his work at the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.

He pursued a career at the same time as on social and cultural anthropology specialized researcher and a professor of social anthropology at Cambridge.

Originally trained as a psychologist, Fortes employed the notion of the " person " for his structural- functional analyzes of the relationship, the family and the ancestor worship and set the benchmark for studies of the social organization of African peoples. His book Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (Eng. " Oedipus and Job in West African religions " ) combined his two interests and put a scale of comparative ethnology. He also wrote extensively on topics such as the firstborn, kinship and Divination.

Fortes received his anthropological training of Charles Gabriel Seligman at the London School of Economics. Fortes studied with Bronislaw Malinowski and Raymond Firth. Along with his contemporaries Alfred Radcliffe -Brown, Edmund Leach, Audrey Richards and Lucy Mair took Fortes functionalist views that insisted on empirical evidence to develop analyzes of society.

His given out along with EE Evans -Pritchard factory African Political Systems (1940 ) established the principles of segmentation and balanced opposition, which should be the hallmark of African political anthropology.

This work on political systems in Africa is a document of political anthropology, which attempts a first classification of schemes and propose a theorization of models. It is the result of field studies that have been conducted in eight widely separated areas of Africa. It describes the different types of social organization, such as those encountered in a number of African peoples ( Zulu, Ngwato, Bemba, Ankole, Kede, Bantu, Tallensi and Nuer ).

He has also directed the publication of some other collective works.

Despite his work in francophone West Africa was Fortes ' work on political systems of influence on other British anthropologists, particularly Max Gluckman, and played a role in the development of the known as the Manchester School direction of social anthropology, which emphasizes the problems of labor in colonial Central Africa. Fortes spent much of his career as a lecturer at the University of Cambridge.

Works

  • Social and psychological Aspects of education in Taleland. Oxford Univ. Press, London, 1938.
  • ( Evans -Pritchard, eds ) African Political Systems 1940
  • The dynamics of clanship among the Tallensi: being the first part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans - Volta Tribe. London [ inter alia ]: Oxford Univ. Press, 1945
  • Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi. The Second Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans - Volta Tribe. Oxford University Press for the International African Institute 1949
  • ( Jack Goody, ed ) The developmental cycle in domestic groups. Cambridge: Univ. Press, 1958
  • Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (German under the title " Oedipus and Job in West African religions " ) 1959
  • Cambridge Papers in Social Anthropology. Cambridge University Press 1962
  • Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan. Chicago Aldine Publishing Company 1969
  • Time and Social Structure in 1970
  • (Ed.) Social Structure in 1970
  • ( with Sheila Patterson, eds. ) Studies in African Social Anthropology 1975
  • ( Jack Goody, ed ) Religion, morality and the person: essays on religion Tallensi. Cambridge [ua ]: Cambridge University Press, 1987
Britstown Ashanti people Structural functionalism Functionalism Empiricism E. E. Evans-Pritchard Zulu people Nuer people Name Authority File
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