The Dynamics of Fieldwork Among the Talensi
Meyer Fortes in Northern Ghana, 1934–7
Dados Bibliográficos
| ID | 7090146 |
|---|---|
| Autores | John Parker (0009-0007-0189-2572, SOAS University of London, autor correspondente) |
| Peer Reviewed | Não |
| Open Access | Não |
| Idioma | EN |
| Citações recebidas | 2 |
| Referências citadas | 21 |
This article examines the encounter between the social anthropologist Meyer Fortes and his wife Sonia, on the one hand, and the Talensi people of northern Ghana, on the other, in the years 1934–7. Based in large part on the Forteses’ extensive corpus of recently archived field notes, diaries and other papers, it argues that the quotidian dynamics of that encounter were in many ways quite different from those of Talensi social life as enshrined in Meyer's famous published monographs. Far from entering a timeless world of enduring clanship and kinship, the Forteses grappled with a society struggling to come to terms with the forces of colonial change. The focus is on the couple's shifting relationship with two dominant figures in the local political landscape in the 1930s: Tongrana Nambiong, the leading Talensi chief and their host in the settlement of Tongo, and Golibdaana Tengol, a wealthy ritual entrepreneur who dominated access on the part of ‘stranger’ pilgrims to the principal oracular shrine in the adjacent Tong Hills. These two bitter rivals were, by local standards, commanding figures – yet both emerge as psychologically complex characters riddled with anxiety, unease and self-doubt. The ethnographic archive is thereby shown to offer the possibility of a more intimate history of the interior lives of non-literate African peoples on remote colonial frontiers who often passed under the radar of the state and its documentary regime
Archaeology · Colonialism · Dynamics (music · Ethnography · Ethnology · Field (mathematics · Kinship · Political science · Politics · Settlement (finance · Social dynamics · Social science · Sociology · State (computer science · Wife · African history and culture studies · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Cultural Identity and Heritage · Gender Studies · History · Law
Religion, Morality and the Person
Writing and Colonialism in Northern Ghana
The cheese and the worms
Circle of Iron’
The Dynamics of Clanship among the Tallensi—being the First Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe
Search for Security
The Cheese and the Worms
Psychosis and Social Change among the Tallensi of Northern Ghana
Notes toward a biography of Meyer Fortes
The Expansive Moment
Northern Gothic
Religion, Morality and the Person
Food in the Domestic Economy of the Tallensi
Culture Contact as a Dynamic Process an Investigation in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast
Threads and Traces
An Anthropologist's Apprenticeship
Meyer Fortes and material culture
Microhistory
Earth and shadow
| Velocidade de citação | historical |
|---|---|
| Altamente citado | Não |