IDNO

N.102206.MF

Description

Two Tallensi men wearing loin cloths and cloth caps building an adobe wall. One man is standing next to the wall while the other is crouching down.

Place

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

Cultural Affliation

Tallensi

Named Person

Photographer

?Fortes, Meyer

Collector / Expedition

Fortes, Meyer

Date

12 March 1935

Collection Name

Fortes Collection

Source

Drucker-Brown, Susan

Format

Glass Negative Halfplate

Primary Documentation

Other Information

N.102206.MF - N.102212.MF were kept in the box now numbered C554/.

Context: Fortes describes the architecture of a Tallensi homestead, “ The homesteads are solidly constructed of pile (puddled mud, tan), and they are built to last. Erecting the circular walls tier by tier, plastering them, roofing the rooms, stamping the floors, adding the small contrivances and the decorations that increase the comfort and attraction of a homestead, are all the tasks requiring considerable skill, care and cooperation...The conventional division of labour involves both sexes equally in the building of a homestead. Building and thatching is men’s work; plastering, drawing the crude lines and geometrical designs that decorate the walls, and stamping the floors into smooth, hard surfaces are all women’s work. According to its size and the number of workers available, from the commencement to the final touches, it takes from three weeks to two months of intermittent but often strenuous labour build a homestead. This falls chiefly on all its future occupants. All the members of the family, including the children, lend a hand. But co-members of the owner’s clan, especially of his own local segment and their wives, as well as kinsmen, affines, and friends, lend their services too, and this involves considerable expenditure of foodstuffs to reward them. (Fortes, 1949, p. 48) [Alicia Fentiman, 23/4/2008].

Context: The importance of building a new house is described as, “an outstanding event in the life of a its owner and a matter or public attention. It always marks a significant change in a man’s status-his economic and jural emancipation from minority, or his attainment of eldership high up in the lineage hierarchy. Hence it requires moral sanction and ritual precautions. As we have seen, it also mobilises all the basic social ties a man has. The house itself, embodying the labour and care of himself, his family, and many of his relatives by blood and marriage, sands as a monument to the efficacy of these social ties”. (Fortes, 1949, p. 48). [Alicia Fentiman, 23/4/2008]

Context: “Houses: Flying over inhabited parts of north eastern Ghana, the traveller looks down at a series of circular reddish-brown patterns, almost like the yeast that women dry on the floors of their compounds in the process of making beer from millet. The pattern are ‘compounds’, in which most of the rural population and many of the urban population live. In most rural areas these compounds are the only architecture. They are built in variations of a common pattern, in a similar manner, using mud, made with water and earth containing clay. Although, there is some use of brick made with mud and straw, or of cement block (particularly in government buildings), most walls are built up like the sides of enormous pots and most rooms are still roofed with thatch. Over the past thirty years metal roofing has begun to replace thatch. Where this happens, circular rooms are giving way to rectangular shapes. The changes, from thatch to metal roof and from circular to rectangular walls, are a matter of individual choice and circumstance. Metal roofing is expensive and provides none of the insulation against heat and cold that comes with thatch. However, the great benefit of metal, and the reason given me by those who have changed to metal roofing, is that metal is fireproof and requires less maintenance. On the other hand, the rectilinear walls appropriate for metal roofing are, as Prussin explains (1969: 114), physically weaker than circular walls when mud is the building material. It should be emphasised here, however, though changes in roofing and the shape of rooms are occurring throughout northern Ghana, people have retained the distinctive relationships between open and walled spaces, and the adornments or lack of ornament and the places where these occur, all of which characterise different ethnic groups in the region. The continuity of architectural styles is impressive. Throughout the north, some aspects of architectural detail may reflect an owner’s personal taste or financial circumstance, but the presence or absence of perimeter walls, the shape and placement of granaries, the colour and finish of exterior and interior walls, as well as the traditional styles of roofing thatch, are all assertions of clan and lineage history. Thus, architectural styles correspond to the now disappearing, customary facial scars that accompanied the linguistic and cultural differences once called ‘tribal’. Some types of houses are strikingly beautiful, others are equally strikingly untidy. Most importantly, however, a knowledgeable visitor can tell the residents’ ethnic group by the traditional roofing of rooms and the style of a compound entrance. Thus, throughout northern Ghana the external aspect of a house asserts a political identity. The comparison presented here explores the manner in which values associated with that identity may be reflected and reinforced.” (Drucker-Brown, S., ‘House and Hierarchy: Politics and Domestic Space in Northern Ghana,’ The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Vol. 7, No. 4., pp. 669 - 685.). [ED 10/12/2007]

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. [Elisabeth Deane 25/3/2008] [Alicia Fentiman, 30/4/2008]