IDNO

N.101819.MF

Description

A man sits on the ground beside the entrance to a room in a Tallensi compound. He has a knife in his belt and is holding a fly whisk of animal hair as he performs a sacrifice to the spirit ancestors. There is an animal skin laid out on the ground beside him and a calabash bowl. Beside him, to the right of the entrance is an ancestor shrine built from an adobe cone surrounded by a number of ritually significant objects and stained with past sacrifices including feathers from fowl and blood. To the left of the entrance is a pot or calabash decorated around the shoulder topped with an upturned calabash lid, described by Fortes as a medicine pot. Above them, hanging on the wall are bundles of feathers and probably the bows and arrows of the owner which are closely associated with his identity. [AF 16/4/2008]

Place

W Africa; Ghana; Upper East Region [Gold Coast; Northern Territories]

Cultural Affliation

Tallensi

Named Person

Photographer

?Fortes, Meyer

Collector / Expedition

Fortes, Meyer

Date

January 1934 - April 1937

Collection Name

Fortes Collection

Source

Drucker-Brown, Susan

Format

Glass Negative Halfplate

Primary Documentation

Other Information

N.101811.MF - N.101821.MF were kept in the box now numbered C545/.

The inscription on the metal box numbered C545/ does not fully correspond with the contents. [Jocelyne Dudding 10/4/2007]

Context: Fortes explains the lay out of a compound and the importance of the dugdanna (senior wife) and her status is recognised. “One sign of this is that most of the ancestor and medicine shrines that are kept indoors rests in the dendanyo and rooms of the senior woman. They include a man’s personal shrines, as well as those of which he is custodian as head of a lineage segment. Sacrifice is offered to these shrines in this dendanyo, the woman and children of the family often taking part. A man’s ancestors keep watch and ward both indoors and out over the things, the place, and the people most precious to him. (Fortes, 1949, p.59). [Alicia Fentiman 15/4/2008]

Context: “When a man sacrifices to an ancestor spirit, any descendant of that ancestor has the right to be present and to share in the sacrament. The only exceptions are the cult of the clan or maximal lineage (bɔɣar). It would be incompatible with the functions of these cults as foci of social integration o the highest level of corporate structure to allow non-members of the lineage concerned to take part in them. But an ahəη may attend domestic sacrifices to any of his matrilateral ancestors and sacrifices to the founding ancestor’s shrine (bɔɣar) of the lineage of his true or classificatory mother’s brother. If a man proposes to make a sacrifice to one of his immediate antecedents (say, his father or grandfather), and if he is going to sacrifice anything larger than a fowl or guinea fowl (say, a goat or a sheep or a cow), he is in duty bound to inform his sisters.” (Fortes, 1949, p.321). [AF 15/4/2008]

Bibliographical Reference: Fortes, Meyer, 1945. Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi (London: Oxford University Press).

Bibliographical Reference: Fortes, Meyer, 1949. The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi (London: Oxford University Press).

Bibliographical Reference: Fortes, Meyer, 1987. Religion, Morality and the Person: Essays on Tallensi Religion (London: Oxford University Press).

This catalogue record has been updated with the support of the Getty Grant Program Two. [Jocelyne Dudding 10/4/2007] [Alicia Fentiman 16/4/2008]