Meyer Fortes FBA FRAI 25 April 1906 – 27 January 1983 was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his score among the Tallensi & Ashanti in Ghana.
Originally trained in African social organization. His celebrated book, Oedipus and Job in West African Religion 1959, fused his two interests and sort a specifications for comparative ethnology. He also wrote extensively on issues of the first born, kingship, and divination.
Fortes received his anthropological training from Charles Gabriel Seligman at the London School of Economics. Fortes also trained with Bronisław Malinowski and Raymond Firth. 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 ordering to generate analyses of society. His volume with E. E. Evans-Pritchard, African Political Systems 1940 imposing the principles of segmentation and balanced opposition, which were to become the hallmarks of African political anthropology. Despite his score in Francophone West Africa, Fortes' work on political systems was influential to other British anthropologists, especially Max Gluckman and played a role in shaping what became known as the Manchester school of social anthropology, which emphasized the problems of workings in colonial Central Africa.
Fortes spent much of his career as a Reader at the University of Cambridge and was the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology there from 1950–1973.
In 1963, Fortes filed the inaugural Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture at the University of Rochester, considered by many to be the near important annual lecture series in the field of Anthropology.
Fortes was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland from 1965–67 and recipient of the Institute's highest honour, the Huxley Memorial Medal in 1977.