IDNO

LS.103380.MF

Description

"Building play. In the background a newly built room. On the right of the group a big boy demonstrating to a small boy. Behind them, part of a ‘house’ they have finished. On the left, girls making the swish and demonstrating to the ethnographer’s wife."
To the left, Sonia Fortes is wearing a white dress and standing outside a flat-roofed hut with a group of Tallensi children. Seven Tallensi children are seated on the ground, one is leaning against the wall of a Tallensi hut and another is bent over demonstrating to a small boy seated on the ground.

Place

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

Cultural Affliation

Tallensi

Named Person

Mrs Sonia Fortes (nee Donen)

Photographer

Fortes, Meyer

Collector / Expedition

Fortes, Meyer

Date

Collection Name

Fortes Collection

Source

Drucker-Brown, Susan

Format

Lanternslide - Black & White

Primary Documentation

Other Information

LS.103380.MF - LS.103389.MF were kept in the box now numbered C568/.

Publication: Image published in Fortes, Myer., 1970. Time and Social Structure and other Essays. (University of London, Athlone Press), p.253, "4a. Building play. In the background a newly built room. On the right of the group a big boy demonstrating to a small boy. Behind them, part of a ‘house’ they have finished. On the left, girls making the swish and demonstrating to the ethnographer’s wife." [ED 21/5/2008]

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).

Context: "The next three of four years of a child’s life are probably its freest and happiest. Its energies are spent in play or in roaming around the immediate neighbourhood of the homestead in the company of slightly older siblings or classificatory siblings. But children of this age delight in being with their parents too. They will hang around their mother in the kitchen and trot around and sit with their father when he is resting under the shade tree. They see and hear everything that is going on in the house and are tolerated at all domestic occasions. In this way, and through mimetic play, they build up the rudimentary schemas of ideas, manual dexterities, and sentiments out of which grow the skills, interests, and values of later life. Love and indulgence is still the keynote of their parents’ and other close relatives’ attitudes to them. Tallensi say that small children at this stage are more attached to their mother than to their father because it is she who feeds them. In fact, as we have already mentioned, throughout a Talen’s life he thinks of his mother as the one who gave him food without stint, going hungry herself, if need be, so that her child might be fed.
By the age of 7 or 8 the child’s world is becoming much more complex; and the shadow of discipline and authority is creeping over it. Until it reaches the threshold of adolescence, at about 12 to 14 years of age, it still remains free to play for much of its time. But from the age of 7 or so boys and girls are eager to participate in the adult routine of life and they become more and more involved in it. They begin by being given the simplest economic and household tasks such as scaring the birds from the fields of ripening grain, tethering the goats, rounding up the poultry-tasks which children of both sexes perform-or sweeping the house, carrying a tiny pot of water, gathering edible fungi or herbs for the pot, which girls only do. A very common task of both girl and boys of this age is acting nursemaid to a baby. As this shows, there is very little social differentiation between them." (Fortes, M., 1949, The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi, (London: Oxford University Press), p. 190.). [ED 28/11/2007]

This catalogue record has been updated with the support of the Getty Grant Program Two. [Elisabeth Deane 20/5/2008]