Meyer Fortes et la culture matérielle : image publiée et ressourcesnon publiées

Material culture is almost entirely absent in Fortes's writing on the Tallensi, presumably a correlate of his structural functionalist position. In contrast, his unpublished notebooks compensate for this apparent gap and have been of significant use for interpreting aspects of past material culture use and materiality in the archaeological record of the Tongo Hills of northern Ghana. This point is discussed with reference to Fortes's descriptions of iron and stone in Tallensi lifeways and the materiality of festivals and shrines. Thus Fortes's unpublished archive indicates the potential offered by the anthropologist's notebook as a multi-disciplinary resource which perhaps might be paralleled in the notebooks of other anthropologists of the period. © Royal Anthropological Institute 2010.