The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi

The Second Part of an Analysis of the Social Structure of a Trans-Volta Tribe

Meyer Fortes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138591981
• eBook ISBN: 9780429954191
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1949, this book takes the analysis of Tale social structure further. It shows how the patriarchal principle regulates domestic life and thus moulds individual development among the Tallensi. The analysis of the inter-connexion of Legal, econoic and personal relationships sheds new light on the general problems of social organization in patriarchal societies, both in Africa and elsewhere.

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

The Large-scale Framework of Tale Society

THE central subject of the first part of this analysis of Tale social structure was the lineage system.¹ Our attention was fixed on the permanent large-scale framework of the society in relation to which individuals behave primarily as members of corporate groups. We observed that according to native belief and usage this framework has maintained its form from time immemorial and must continue to do so as long as their social system lasts. Our data left little doubt that in fact the macroscopic social structure of the Tallensi has been highly stable in form for at least five generations and probably for many more. We found evidence, however, that a continuous process of adjustment in the grading of structural relations between the component units of the total social structure underlies its stable form. These adaptations take place in response to economic, structural, and religious stresses. Though they do not alter the established forms of corporate grouping by means of which Tale collective life is organized, they do affect the social relations of persons as individuals and as members of corporate groups. Nor can there be any doubt that they are inherent in the social structure; whatever sets them in motion at any given time or in any given sector of the society, they are made possible by the dynamic factors inherent in the constitution of the stable large-scale units of social organization. We saw that units of Tale social organization can only be defined by reference to the way in which they emerge in corporate action in relation to other like units, and not by mechanical criteria.

For convenience of orientation I shall here sum up the principal results of our previous study. The Tallensi² are typical of the great congeries of Mole-Dagbane-speaking peoples that occupy the basin of the Volta rivers in the French Ivory Coast and the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast.³ In race, speech, culture, social organization, and economy they constitute a completely homogeneous community of sedentary farmers. But there is no ‘tribal unity’ among the Tallensi in the ordinarily accepted sense of this phrase. They have no fixed territorial boundaries, nor are they precisely marked off from neighbouring ‘tribes’ by cultural or linguistic usages. They have no political unity in the sense of being uniformly and exclusively subject to a single, centralized tribal government (other than that imposed by the British Colonial Government),¹ and no judicial or administrative machinery such as goes with a centralized form of government.²

The ‘tribal unity’ of the Tallensi is, in general terms, the unity of a distinct socio-geographical region forming a segment of a greater region of similar cultural type, economic organization, and social structure. This region can be demarcated only by dynamic criteria. The Tallensi have more in common among themselves, both in sentiment and in nuances of cultural usage, and closer social and politico-ritual bonds inter se, than the component segments of Tale society have with other like units outside what we have called Taleland. This characteristic of Tale society has a special relevance for the investigation we are undertaking in this book. For, like the network of clanship ties and the bonds of common custom and of politico-ritual association analysed in our first book, the web of kinship spreads far beyond the social frontiers of the Tallensi. This is one of the ways in which the field of inter-personal relations is congruent with the structure of relations between corporate groups among the Tallensi.

The principle of segmentary differentiation and the associated principle of dynamic coherence operate in every department of Tale social organization. We described in our previous work how the Tallensi are internally divided by a major cleavage into two clusters of clans, the Namoo clans on the one hand, and the Talis³ clans and their congeners on the other. These two groups are distinguished by differences in their myths of origin, their totemic and quasi-totemic usages and beliefs, the politico-ritual privileges and duties connected with the Earth cult and the ancestor cult, and to some extent by their local distribution. The clans belonging to each group are more closely interlinked by clanship and politico-ritual ties than any one of them is linked to clans of the other group. But very close bonds of local contiguity, and of politico-ritual interdependence and co-operation in assuring the maintenance of the common interests of the society—peace and the rule of custom, fertility of soil and of man, health and prosperity—unite the two groups. In particular, inter-personal ties of kinship and of affinity link the members of the two groups of clans to one another, so that practically every Namoo has kinsmen among the Talis and vice versa.

These two groups of clans, we learnt, never combined for defence against or attack on neighbouring ‘tribes’. Indeed, they were the traditional enemies of one another, and war sometimes broke out between Namoos and Talis in the Tongo area. But these wars were short and sharp. They were acute forms of internal dissension rather than wars as we understand the term, and they immediately set on foot actions to restore the status quo ante. Thus they served to emphasize the inescapable interdependence of the two groups.

The unity and moral solidarity of all the Tallensi emerge most conspicuously during the annual cycle of the Great Festivals. At these times the divergent interests that normally dominate the corporate actions of clans or groups of clans are set aside in obedience to ritual sanctions. A series of rites and ceremonies requiring the co-operation of both major groups of clans takes place, in which the greatest common interests and values of the whole society are dramatized and affirmed. The solidarity of the widest political community to which every Tateŋ belongs thus becomes temporarily supreme, and no intestine dissensions at other times can destroy it.

The Great Festivals bring out two points of special importance. They show, firstly, that the widest unified political community in which Tallensi participate is not a fixed group but a functional synthesis based on a dynamic social equilibrium. This equilibrium is maintained by the balancing against one another of like corporate units; by the play of the counterpoised ties and cleavages of clanship, kinship, and ritual allegiance; and through the agency of complementary politico-ritual-institutions. And secondly, they show that the whole system hinges on the complementary roles of two types of politico-ritual functionaries, chiefs (na’ab, pl. nad ε m) and Custodians of the Earth (t ε ndaana, pl. t ε ndaanam). The office of chiefship (na’am) is considered to be characteristic of the Namoos, the t ε ndaana-ship of the Talis and their congeners, but neither office is the exclusive prerogative of either group. The picture is further complicated by the existence of other politico-ritual offices, in particular among the Talis, connected with their cult of the External Bɔɣar. The complementary functions of chiefship and t ε n-daana-ship are rooted directly in the social structure, but are also validated by myths of origin and backed by the most powerful religious sanctions of the ancestor cult and of the cult of the Earth. The Namoos are believed to be the descendants of immigrant Mamprusi who fled from Mampurugu many generations ago. Hence they claim remote kinship with the ruling aristocracy of Mampurugu. Their chiefship is derived from that of the Paramount Chief of the Mamprusi, and this is the ultimate sanction of its politico-ritual status in Tale society. The Talis and other clans that have the t ε ndaana-ship claim to be the aboriginal inhabitants of the country, and the ritual sanctions of their office are derived from the Earth cult.

The Maximal Lineage and Clanship Ties

All politico-ritual offices are vested in particular maximal lineages or clans. These are the basic units of Tale social organization that emerge in corporate activities. They are defined primarily by the canon of agnatic descent. A maximal lineage is the most extensive group of people of both sexes all of whom are related to one another by common patrilineal descent traced from one known (or accepted) founding ancestor through known agnatic antecedents. The exact agnatic relationship of every member of a maximal lineage to every other member is, in theory, known or can be ascertained by genealogical reckoning. All the agnatic descendants of the founding ancestor, both male and female, belong to the maximal lineage. But in practice the male members are supreme in the conduct of lineage affairs and the de facto corporate unit is the group of male members. This is due in part to the fact that women members are bound to marry out of the lineage, by the rule of lineage exogamy. As marriage is patrilocal, a woman is usually separated from her male lineage-kinsfolk, and cannot easily take part in regular lineage counsels. What is more important, her children do not belong to her patrilineal lineage and they do not therefore contribute to its physical and social perpetuation. This is one manifestation of the dominance of males and the male line in jural and ritual institutions which, as we shall see in the following pages, is the principal factor governing the inter-personal as well as the corporate relations of individuals.

The maximal lineage is the basis of the Tale clan. A clan (or sub-clan, in a few instances) is a localized unit consisting of a defined segment of a maximal lineage, or a whole maximal lineage; or of two or more linked maximal lineages, augmented, frequently, by one or more accessory lineages incorporated into the clan by a fiction of kinship through a woman of the authentic male line. The commonest type is the composite clan, consisting of two or more linked maximal lineages of independent patrilineal descent whose association is accounted for by a myth of remote kinship or of age-old local solidarity. Every maximal lineage is exogamous, and with very few exceptions this rule applies also to the associations of maximal lineages we have called clans. Apart from local unity and putative genealogical linkage, clans are internally unified by common ritual cults connected with the worship of the ancestors and the earth.

An important corollary to the rule of exogamy in the maximal lineage and clan is the right of a man to inherit the widow of any male member of his lineage or clan, other than those whom he describes as his ‘fathers’ or ‘sons’.

Every Tale clan is anchored to a particular locality from which it takes its name. In the central area of Taleland, around the Tong Hills, the present clan settlements appear to date back not less than eight to ten generations. But they have not been and are not territorially static. There are no strict territorial boundaries between adjacent settlements. The homesteads of a settlement merge with those of the adjacent settlements, and the boundaries between them are definable only in social terms, as a function of their ecological and politico-ritual relations at a given time. In the same way every segment of a clan—that is, each of its component maximal lineages—is anchored to a local subdivision of the clan settlement, though many of its members may be dispersed elsewhere.

A striking feature of Tale social organization is the system of inter-clan linkages which constitutes one of the principal forces of cohesion in the society. The genealogically and socially autonomous maximal lineage or clan is not a closed group. The component maximal lineages that form the segments of adjacent clans have ties of clanship identical with those that unite them to one another within their respective clans. Thus if two adjacent clans have segments A, B, C, and D, E, F, G, respectively, then A (but not B or C) may have clanship ties with D (but not with E, F, or G); B may have clanship ties only with E, and C with F. Each of these maximal lineages also has clanship ties with segments of other neighbouring clans. Thus each component maximal lineage of a clan has a field of clanship that includes the other segments of the clan as well as segments of other clans. This results in a network of interlocking clanship ties that embraces all the separate clans of Taleland. All the Talis clans and the main block of Namoo clans are interlocked in this way in two clusters which are in turn similarly connected at certain points. Moreover, this system of linkages ties the Tale aggregate on to adjacent clans of other neighbouring ‘tribes’. Thus we observe that at this level of social structure—the skeletal level, so to speak—as in its territorial and cultural relationship to neighbouring ‘tribes’, Tale society is a segment of a greater society. The network of inter-clan linkages is one of the principal factors by which the socio-geographic region we have called Taleland is differentiated as a distinct segment of this greater society.

It is also one of the main factors of social equilibrium in Tale society. Dissension between neighbouring clans is kept in check by the mediation of maximal lineages linked by identical ties to both; and warfare is inhibited from disrupting the entire social order by the intervention of social and ritual obligations arising inter alia out of the fact that enemies are related directly or indirectly by clanship ties. It is this, in part, that gives Tale wars the complexion of acute family quarrels.

A maximal lineage is not only an organic genealogical unit, it is also ipso facto an organic ritual unit. The focus of its genealogical differentiation from and relative autonomy in relation to other like units, as well as of its corporate solidarity and its continuity in time, is the cult of its founding ancestor. The material symbol of this is the shrine (bɔɣar) of that ancestor, custody of which is vested in the head (i.e. the most senior male) of the lineage. Among the Talis each segment of a composite clan has its lineage bɔɣar, distinguishing it from the other segments of the clan. But, in addition, groups of maximal lineages belonging, severally, to different clans, and not necessarily united inter se by ties of clanship, collaborate in the cult of their collective ancestors. The collective ancestors are believed to dwell in a bɔɣar known as an External Bɔɣar. An External Bɔɣar is usually a sacred grove, or a shallow cave in the hill-side, where the community meets for the ritual of the cult. The most important rites of the cult occur during the Harvest Festival, when thanksgiving sacrifices are offered and young men of the group are initiated into its mysteries by special ceremonies.

Clanship ties, as we have mentioned, constitute the principal factor of social integration among all the Tallensi. Among the Talis the cult of the External Bɔɣar is another important factor of cohesion and equilibrium. It unites segments of different clans in the worship of the ancestors, and is common to the majority of Talis clans. It represents a system of social bonds that cut across and counterpoise th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• List of Plates
• Chapter I. Introductory
• Chapter II. Kinship and the Lineage System
• Chapter III. The Homestead and the Joint Family
• Chapter IV. Husband and Wife in the Structure of the Family
• Chapter V. Parents and Children in the Framework of the Lineage
• Chapter VI. The Moral Basis of the Relationship of Parent and Child
• Chapter VII. The Genetic Development of Parent–Child Relationships
• Chapter VIII. Tensions in the Parent–Child Relationship
• Chapter IX. Grandparents and Grandchildren
• Chapter X. Siblings in the Social Structure
• Chapter XI. The Web of Extra-Clan Kinship
• Chapter XII. The Functions of Kinship
• Index