Meyer Fortes FBA FRAI was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.
10 Facts About Meyer Fortes
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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.
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Meyer Fortes's celebrated book, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion, fused his two interests and set a standard for comparative ethnology.
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Meyer Fortes wrote extensively on issues of the first born, kingship, and divination.
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Meyer Fortes received his anthropological training from Charles Gabriel Seligman at the London School of Economics.
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Radcliffe-Brown, Sir Edmund Leach, Audrey Richards, and Lucy Mair, Meyer Fortes held strong functionalist views that insisted upon empirical evidence in order to generate analyses of society.
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In 1963, Meyer 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.
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Meyer Fortes was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society.
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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.
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In 2021, the granddaughter of Meyer Fortes donated these letters to the National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide in Kyiv.