Meyer Fortes
Meyer Fortes | |
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| Born | 25 April 1906 Ashanti |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | anthropology |
| Academic advisors | Bronisław Malinowski |
| Part of a series on |
| Anthropology |
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Meyer Fortes
Ashanti in Ghana
.
Originally trained in
kingship, and divination
.
Life
Fortes received his anthropological training from
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 anthropology. 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 and was the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology there from 1950–1973.
In 1963, Fortes delivered the inaugural
Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the University of Rochester, considered by many to be the most important annual lecture series in the field of Anthropology.[1]
Fortes was elected to the
Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland from 1965–67 and recipient of the Institute's highest honour, the Huxley Memorial Medal in 1977. He was also an elected member of the American Philosophical Society.[3]
Holodomor testimony
Meyer Fortes corresponded with his close friend Jerry Berman, who in the early 1930s worked in the USSR as a civil engineer and documented the famine in his private letters. In 2021, the granddaughter of Fortes donated these letters to the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv.[4][5][6]
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.
- 1949. 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.
References
- ^ Kavoussi, Bonnie J (16 September 2008). "Matory To Join Duke Faculty". The Harvard Crimson. Retrieved 19 July 2014.
- ^ "Meyer Fortes". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 18 August 2022.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 18 August 2022.
- ^ "Jerry Berman's letters". 30 November 2021.
- ^ "Letters to University of Cumbria academic's grandparents reveal famine horror in Ukraine in the 1930s". 10 October 2021.
- ^ "H-SAfrica: Discussions | H-Net".
- Hart, Keith (2018).“Structural Dynamics: Forms, Networks, Numbers. (Meyer Fortes in the 1940s)”, in BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
- Kuper, Adam (2018). « L’ancêtre sans culte : une biographie intellectuelle de Meyer Fortes », in BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
- Parker, John (November 2013). "The dynamics of fieldwork among the Talensi: Meyer Fortes in northern Ghana, 1934-7'". S2CID 144582572.
External links
- Functionalism
- Lecture by Meyer Fortes on Talensi divination followed by a discussion with students. Filmed 1982 by Audio Visual Aids Unit in Cambridge
- Resources related to research : BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. "Fortes, Meyer (1906-1983)", Paris, 2018. (ISSN 2648-2770)
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