Meyer Fortes FBA FRAI (25 April 1906 – 27 January 1983) was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.
Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard for studies on African social organization.
His celebrated book, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1959), fused his two interests and set a standard for comparative ethnology.
Along with contemporaries A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Sir Edmund Leach, Audrey Richards, and Lucy Mair, Fortes held strong functionalist views that insisted upon empirical evidence in order to generate analyses of society.
[3] Meyer Fortes corresponded with his close friend Jerry Berman, who in the early 1930s worked in the USSR as a civil engineer and documented the famine in his private letters.