Meyer Fortes

Meyer Fortes was a South African-born British social anthropologist and a central figure in the development of British structural-functionalist kinship theory. Co-editor with E. E. Evans-Pritchard of African Political Systems (1940), he helped establish the comparative study of African political organization as a major field within social anthropology, and his own extensive fieldwork among the Tallensi of northern Ghana, published in works including The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi (1945), produced some of the most detailed structural analyses of lineage systems and ancestor worship in the discipline. Fortes developed influential concepts in kinship theory, including the distinction between complementary filiation and descent, that shaped how anthropologists analyzed the structure of unilineal descent groups for decades after his fieldwork.