Essays in Social Anthropology Religion, morality and the person

361 Pages·2012·6.62 MB·English

Essays in Social Anthropology
Religion, morality and the person
Meyer Fortes (1906—1982) was one of the foremost anthropologists
of this century, who for many years worked among the Tallensi of
northern Ghana. Although he published seminally important
monographs on Tallensi family and kinship and on political
organization, his work on their religion has hitherto remained
confined to disparate journals and edited volumes. This collection
brings together for the firstt ime in one place his major writings on
religion.
The compilation is important both ethnographically, in terms of
what it adds to the corpus of literature on a people who have been
highly significant in the development of anthropology, and
theoretically. Trained as a psychologist, Fortes was particularly
concerned with the relationship between psychoanalysis and
anthropology, and this volume both explores that relationship and
presents his psychologically-oriented approach to the anthropology
of religion. It also examines the moral implications, both personal
and cultural, of religious action and belief in simple societies.
Although the material included in the volume is drawn mainly
from his work on the Tallensi, Fortes is throughout concerned with
the wider, comparative implications of the particular case for
understanding religion in other societies, including our own. The
collection will appeal to all readers interested in the anthropology
and psychology of religion, as well as in religious studies generally.
Essays in Social Anthropology
I. M. Lewis: Religion in context
Meyer Fortes: Religion, morality and the person:
Essays on Tallensi religion
Religion, morality and
the person
Essays on Tallensi religion
Meyer Fortes
Late William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology
in the University of Cambridge
Edited and with an introduction by Jack Goody
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© Cambridge University Press 1987
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First published 1987
Re-issued in this digitally printed version 2008
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Fortes, Meyer,
Religion, morality, and the person.
(Essays in social anthropology)
Bibliography:
1. Tallensi (African people) - Religion.
I. Goody, Jack. II. Title. III. Series.
BL2480.T3F67 1987 299'.683 87-9382
ISBN 978-0-521-33505-8 hardback
ISBN 978-0-521-33693-2 paperback
Contents
List of figures vi
Introduction by Jack Goody vii
1 Divination: religious premisses and
logical techniques 1
2 Prayer 22
3 Ritual festivals and the ancestors 37
4 Ancestor worship in Africa 66
5 Ritual and office 84
6 Totem and taboo 110
7 Coping with destiny 145
8 Custom and conscience 175
9 The first born 218
10 The concept of the person 247
Endpiece: sacrifice among theologians and
anthropologists 287
Notes 302
References 327
Index 340
Figures
1 Tallensi divination: a collection of code objects 8
2 Tallensi divination: a divining session 8
a First episode: the diviner summons his divining
ancestors 8
b Second episode: the diviner and the consultor work
out the diagnosis of the situation 9
c Third episode: the consultor works over the
diagnosis to confirm it 9
3 Sweeping away Mansami's evil destiny (1) 163
4 Sweeping away Mansami's evil destiny (2) 164
Introduction
A book containing Meyer Fortes' work on the religion of the Tal-
lensi of northern Ghana is of importance in the first place because it
complements those on the political and domestic domains of Tal-
lensi society which he published over thirty years ago (1945, 1949).
The present volume, together both with the previous two and with
other papers that have appeared over the years, make up one of the
most important bodies of ethnographic work ever carried out by a
single scholar on a particular people. As such it is comparable in
scope to the studies undertaken by his British anthropological con-
tempories, that is, Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer of the Southern
Sudan, Firth on the Tikopia in the Pacific, and Gluckman and
Richards on the Lozi and Bemba of Zambia respectively.
But while it is ethnographically important to collect together the
corpus of work on a people who have become so well known in
anthropological studies, not only of Africa but in a much wider com-
parative sense, to do so also makes a significant theoretical contri-
bution. Fortes was trained as a psychologist as well as being
interested in the relation between psychoanalysis and anthropology.
This background was of great significance in all his work, but
especially so in his study of ritual and religion.
Fortes always intended to write a book on the religion of the Tal-
lensi to complement the two he had published on family and kinship
and on political organization. Although he never wrote a major
volume on the topic (except for Oedipus and Job, his Frazer lecture),
he had in fact been thinking about it from the very beginning of his
research, and his studies of kinship and politics were already im-
pregnated with an interest in the religious aspects of these domains.
vn
viii Introduction
One of his first articles was entitled 'Ritual festivals and social co-
hesion in the hinterland of the Gold Coast' (American Anthropol-
ogist 38 (1936):590-604; reprinted Fortes 1970). It examined the
way in which the interlocking cycles of Great Festivals knit together,
in their content and in their performance, the groups that made up
that ambiguously defined 'tribal' constellation known as the Tal-
lensi. What he stresses is the role, in these societies without effective
rulers, of the ritual festivals as forces not only for cohesion in a
mechanical sense, but also as arenas for playing out political conflict
and for assuring personal identification. His more general work on
the Tallensi political system certainly pays more attention to the role
of shrines such as the external boghar than it does to the wheelings
and dealings of the struggle for secular power. And his important
study of kinship and the family is noteworthy for the way in which
he links parental relations with supernatural ones, men and women
with the ancestors. That was the starting point of his original re-
search proposal submitted to the International African Institute,
influenced as it was by the psychology of Freud, Flugel, E. Miller
and others, by the social anthropology of Malinowski, and by his
experience of the interpretation of religion and the family in his own
religion of birth, Judaism — although at this time he was ideologi-
cally an atheist or, at least, an agnostic. It was the starting point that
led him to dwell on the subject of ancestor worship not only in his
monographic studies but also in a number of general papers,
especially in the Henry Myer's lecture for 1960, Tietas in ancestor
worship', Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 91
(1961): 166—91. This interest in the social psychology of family cults
ran throughout his work. Family development involved relations
with parents who had died as well as with those who were alive, and
hence relations with the more extensive set of ancestors, those of the
whole lineage or clan. Ancestor worship had been seen by a number
of earlier workers in comparative sociology as the elementary form
of the religious life, but it was also central to Freudian interests in
anthropology, and this encouraged Fortes to explore the connec-
tions with the elementary forms of kinship. At the domestic level, at
least, it is perhaps the most sensitive and sophisticated analysis yet
made of a feature which, often in the more generalized form of the
cult of the dead, is found so widely distributed in human societies.
The link between one's relations with parents and with ancestors,
Introduction ix
which was at the same time a link between kinship and religion as
well as between anthropology and psychology, was the topic to
which he returned later in his academic career when, in a more ex-
plicit way, he took up again the interest in psychoanalysis and psy-
chology that had always remained an underlying theme in his
writing and teaching during the intervening period. The context of
this return to his past interests was the memorial lectures he de-
livered in honour of Emanuel Miller and of Ernest Jones in 1972 and
1973 to the Association for Child Psychology and Psychiatry, and
the British Psychoanalytical Society respectively, and reprinted here
as Chapters 9 and 8. In the early 1930s Fortes had worked in the
East End of London under Miller, himself a pupil of the
psychologist-anthropologist, W. H. R. Rivers, and the founder of
The British Journal of Delinquency. Ernest Jones was, of course, the
biographer of Freud, and the opponent of Malinowski on the sub-
ject of the universality of the Oedipus complex.
Fortes' contribution to the study of religion was made on a
number of different planes. In his major books on the Tallensi he
presents an analysis of the way religion and ritual enter in to both
'the web of kinship' (the domestic domain) and 'the dynamics of
clanship' (the political domain), mainly ancestor worship in the first
case and the twin cults of the Earth and the external boghar in the
second. It was his superb command of the Tallensi language that en-
abled him to penetrate directly and profoundly into this difficult
area of practice and belief, and then to link it to other aspects of the
socio-cultural system. But his major contribution lies perhaps on a
different plane altogether. Fortes not only side-stepped many of the
discussions of religion and ritual that held the attention of his prede-
cessors, but he was also little concerned with problems of the ration-
ality of those beliefs and practices, even in the enlightened way these
appeared in the works of his teacher, Malinowski, and his colleague,
Evans-Pritchard. His approach was intellectualist neither in the
sense of nineteenth-century writers nor yet of those currently
interested in cognitive anthropology. Nor did it have much to do
with the pragmatic concerns of Malinowski, or the logical and theo-
centric ones of Evans-Pritchard. Hence, for example, his lack of any
continuing interest, brought out in Chapter 6 of this volume, on
'Totem and Taboo', in classificatory schemes or in what he spoke
of as the totemic 'codes' of observer-centred analyses. In this
x Introduction
important contribution he calls for an actor-centred approach to
religion, a point that leads him directly to the question of morality
and the person. Picking up from Durkheim, at the same time as
going back to his own interest in Judaism (to which he so often
refers in these essays) and to his earliest proposal for research in Africa,
Fortes constantly stresses the moral aspects of religious behaviour.
Hence too his constant recourse to the study of ancestor worship
and his comparative neglect of healing and medicine cults; the latter
not central for his understanding of the Tallensi.
Morality was a matter both of external rules and of internalized
norms. It was the interaction that interested him. This is where his
psychological interests provided so important a perspective on the
sociological material. In his biographical account in the Encyclopae-
dia of the Social Sciences, Barnes remarked that all Fortes' work was
based on principles that were basically psychological (the same com-
ment, more critical in the latter case, was made by Fortes of his own
teacher, Malinowski). In no domain was this as true as in that of re-
ligion. Morality was an intrinsic part of the person and of the con-
cept of the person, la personne morale, in which the social and the
psychological were inseparably fused.
In dealing with totems and taboos, he insists not upon their magi-
cal or logical aspects, nor upon their symbolic significance in some
classificatory schema, but upon their moral (at times 'juraP) mean-
ing for the actors and for the society in which they live. One of the
most significant statements in this regard is the sentence, 'Taboos
are a medium for giving tangible substance to moral obligation.' It
was this concern with the moral aspect of magical as well as of tech-
nical acts that led him to play down the Frazerian approach to magic
and, in other contexts, even the material aspect of technology and
property. It was this again that led him to stress the explicit effects of
taboos and rituals on the actors, and the binding character of the
moral obligations they imposed. His was essentially an actor-
oriented structural-functionalism, based upon a deep understanding
of the language and culture of the Tallensi. In the field he may have
denied himself the camaraderie of the anthropologist-in-jeans; the
solar topee was more in evidence, its use dictated not only by the
habits of the compatriots to which he had to adjust, but also by cur-
rent opinion about social roles as well as about medical precautions.
Nevertheless his ability to participate, comprehend and analyse was