Description: One of the world's most eminent social anthropologists draws upon his many years of study and research in the field of kinship and social organization to review the development of anthropological theory and method from Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) to anthropologists of the 1960s
Brief description:
Meyer Fortes, born in South Africa, became one of the world's leading social anthropologists and his work set the standard for all subsequent studies of African social organization. He trained with Seligman, Malinowski, and Firth; was a reader in social anthropology at Oxford University where he worked with Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard; and from 1950-1973 he was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He died in 1983.
Review Quotes:
"Kinship and the Social Order is an amplified version of the first Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, which Professor Fortes gave at the University of Rochester in 1963. In it, Fortes summarizes some of the main achievements in the study of kinship in relation to social structure since the basic discoveries of Morgan: the systematic character of kinship relations, terminology and institutions, and the relevance of kinship for the study of political structure, especially in societies with unilineal descent groups (Morgan's gens)."
--S. C. Humphreys, Comparative Studies in Society and History
"Professor Fortes' new book is perhaps the most important modern statement of kinship theory.... The present book is an apologia both for a tradition of study and for a personal career: and it is an achievement of considerable magnitude.... One would like to recommend this book to anyone concerned with African studies, but its uncompromising professionalism will make it tough going for the non-anthropologist. Nevertheless, it will reward application; and the case-studies in the book, a monograph within a monograph on the Ashanti, and a brilliant section on the Lozi, must be read by anybody concerned with these peoples."
--Adam Kuper, African Affairs
"Professor Fortes is seeking to state and sum up at length the results of his own researches, his wide reading, and prolonged serious thinking about the essential nature of kinship and kinship systems and their involvement with the enveloping social system.... [T]his book is a grand survey and an exposition of the theoretical framework of the discipline of social anthropology from the vantage point of one of its most characteristic features--structural kinship studies."
--P. H. Gulliver, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
"The interest of this book lies in just this: its detailed exposition of Fortes's conception of anthropology."
--Sally F. Moore, Man
"This is a major theoretical treatise on social structure (largely in tribal societies) by one of the most eminent British social anthropologists. It is the first such work in many years and in many respects a very good book that demands the attention of all social anthropologists.... [H]e makes the necessary conceptual and analytical distinctions, makes them well, and raises the level of comparative social structural analysis to a new high."
--Harold W. Scheffler, American Anthropologist