#meyer fortes

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Radcliffe-Brown with students and staff of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford in 1946. Left to right (front row): K.T. Hajioannou, Phyllis Puckle (Secretary and Librarian), Radcliffe-Brown, Meyer Fortes, K.A. Busia. Back row: L.F. Henriques, W. Newell, W. Brailsford, A.A. Issa, M.N. Srinivas. Via p. 428 of Stocking’s After Tylor. 

[social-anther]

We can regard these observations as facts of custom--as standardized ways of doing, knowing, thinking, and feeling--universally obligatory and valued in a given group of people at a given time. But we can also regard them as facts of social organization or social structure. We then seek to relate them to one another by a scheme of conceptual operations different from that of the previous frame of reference. We see custom as symbolizing or expressing social relations--that is, the ties and cleavages by which persons and groups are bound to one another or divided from one another in the activities of social life. In this sense social structure is not an aspect of culture but the entire culture of a given people handled in a special frame of theory.

Meyer Fortes, “The Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups”

[social-anther]

Lineage genealogies are not historically accurate. But they can be understood if they are seen to be the conceptualization of the existing lineage structure viewed as continuing through time and therefore projected backward as pseudo-history.

Meyer Fortes, “Structure of Unilineal Descent Groups” (1953)

[papierscolles]

Meyer Fortes fait en passant une remarque joyeuse et pleine de sens: « Le problème n'est pas celui de la circulation des femmes ... Une  femme circule par elle-même. On ne dispose  pas d'elle, mais les droits juridiques sur la  progéniture sont fixés au profit d'une personne déterminée.

Meyer Fortes, in Recherches voltaiques, 1967, pp. 135-137.

GILLES DELEUZE,  FÉLIX GUATTARI. CAPITALISME ET SCHIZOPHRÉNIE.  L'ANTI-ŒDIPE.

[accuratepicuresofanthropologists]

Happy birthday to Meyer Fortes, born this day in 1906. This image of Fortes is frequently reproduced online. The original is from the UK’s National Portrait Gallery. Fortes seems to always be smoking a pipe in pictures of him.

[anthropologica]

Meyer Fortes The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi, Being the First Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi: The Second Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe

[anthropologica]

Anita Jacobson-Widding, editora Identity: Personal and Socio-Cultural: A Symposium

Con textos de Meyer Fortes, Mary Douglas, John Blacking, John Gumperz, etc.

[derekfreemanus-blog]

Recently I gave a lecture series at Oxford University on Samoan social structure, this brought him into contact with Meyer Fortes who has become a very significant influence in my doctoral research. so again, thank you, Meyer.