THE HENRY MYERS LECTURE is meant to be addressed to a mixed audienceof anthropologists and non-anthropologists of varied interests. Thismakes it a tempting opportunity for stepping off the straight andnarrow path of professional specialism to wander in the green pasturesof speculation from which one normally averts one's eyes. IfI have been rash in yielding to this temptation, I trust that thisis not an act of impiety towards the founder of this lecture.

When I began my fieldwork among the Tallensi in 1934, the controversyaroused by Malinowski's assault on the Freudian hypothesis ofthe Oedipus complex was still simmering. Though he himself was inthe phase of behaviouristic revulsion against psycho-analysis, hisearlier views remained influential both as a challenge to psycho-analysis,his earlier views remained influential both as a challenge to psycho-analyticaltheory and as a stimulus to anthropologists in the field. Just whatsort of field investigation of the problems in dispute could feasiblybe attempted by an anthropologist, was the subject of lively discussion. The main theoretical issues had been elucidated with characteristicimpartiality and clarity by Seligman, in his Huxley Lecture (1932). But all that was certain was that the primary social field withinwhich the oedipal drama might be expected to manifest itself in customand behaviour was that of family and kinship. The tricky questionof what inferences could legitimately be made from overt customarybehaviour to the hidden motives and fantasies identified by psycho-analysis,was left unresolved, as indeed it still is to a great extent (cf.Leach 1959). However, a distinctive orientation towards both field-workand theory emerged as the ethnographic monographs and studies of thethirties and forties testify. As it shaped itself for me there werethree basic rules. The first, learnt from Malinowski, was that acustom, or body of custom, whatever its historical source may havebeen, is meaningful in the contemporary social life of a people, andthat the anthropologist's essential task is to investigate thisfact. The second, learnt from Radcliffe-Brown, was that custom isembedded in social structure and is significant of social relations. The third, due to the prevailing climate of psychological thought,was that custom is the socially tolerable expression of motives, feelingsand dispositions that are not always acknowledgeable and may includepotentially disruptive as well as constructive elements.

Thus far from being in position to establish my good faith by showingan interest in such neutral topics as string figures (which have nosignificance except as an amusement for children), material culture,or crops and markets, I was flung straight into divination, funeralceremonies, domestic sacrifices, and the Harvest and Sowing Festivals. And it quickly became apparent that no understanding of these ritualand ceremonial activities was possible without a thorough knowledgeof the kinship, family, and descent structure. For the Tallensi,like most African peoples with a highly developed system of ancestorworship, patently associated with descent groups and institutions,fit very well the paradigm of the religious community, in what hespoke of as 'early stages', sketched with such masterlyinsight by W. Robertson Smith in The Religion of the Semites. I refer to his observation (p. 54) that 'it is not with a vaguefear of unknown powers, but with a loving reference for known godswho are knit to their worshippers by strong bonds of kinship'that religions begin. He was struck by the parental characteristicof early Semitic divinities and connected this with the compositionof the congregation of worshippers as invariably a 'circle ofkin' whose greatest kinsman was the worshipped god. 'Theindissoluble bond that united men to their god', he concludes,'is the same bond of blood fellowship which ... is the one bindinglink between man and man, and one sacred principle of moral obligation'(p. 53). And particularly worthy of recollection, for its bearingon the theme to-day, is his comment (p. 58) that 'the feelingscalled forth when the deity was conceived as a father were on thewhole of an austerer kind; than those directed to a maternal deitybecause of the father's claim to be 'honoured and servedby his son'.

Robertson Smith was not the only scholar of his generation who perceivedthe connexion between the institutions of kinship on the one hand,and religious beliefs and practices on the other. He was indeed anticipatedby a quarter of a century by that other inspired precursor of ourcurrent ideas, Fustel de Coulanges, to whom I am specially indebted. But for him the linkage was to all intents the other way round. Where Robertson Smith supposed parenthood and kinship to underly theworship of their gods by the Semites, Fustel argued (1864, bk. ii,chap. v) that is the ancestral cult of the Romans which imposed agnatickinship. 'The source of kinship', he says, 'was notthe material fact of birth; it was the religious cult;'¹ and he goes on (chap.vii) to demonstrate brilliantly how succession and inheritance areinterlaced with the domestic ancestor cult. I quote: 'Man diesbut the cult goes on ... While the domestic religion continues, thelaw of property must continue with it,' and further, with regardto the law of succession, 'since the domestic religion is hereditary... from male to male, property is so too ... what makes the son theheir is not the personal wish of his father ... the son inherits asof full right ... the continuation of the property, as of the cults,is an obligation for him as much as a right. Whether he desires itor not it falls to him'. The essential point, by his reasoning,was that in early Greek and Roman Law descent in the male line exclusivelydetermined the right to inherit and succeed to a father's propertyand status but it was primarily a religious relationship. Hence ason who had been excluded from the paternal cult my emancipation wasalso cut of from his inheritance, whereas a complete stranger who has made a member of the family cult by adoptionthus became a son entitled to inherit both the worship an the property.

Robertson Smith was not immune from the fallacies of his day andhas been justifiably criticized for this,² and Fustel, I understand,is considered by some Classical scholars to have subordinated scholarshipunduly to conjecture. Be this as it may, we cannot but admire theirperspicacity in directing attention to the social matrix of the typeof religious institutions they were concerned with. For at that timethe orthodox approach to early religions was by way of their manifestcontent of belief. From their pinnacle of intellectual rectitude,most scholars saw no further than the false logic, the erroneous cosmology,and the emotionally distorted superstitions which their pre-conceivedtheories revealed in non-Christian religions. This was the schoolof thought whose first concern was with what Robertson Smith designatedas the 'nature of the Gods' and with which he contrastedhis own procedure (cf. p. 8). This is the tradition of Tylor, Frazer,and Marett, and the host of their followers, amplifiers and expositorstoo numerous to list (and mostly now quite obsolete). And this, fundamentally,purified of its grosser bias, is the tradition of Malinowski and ofLévy-Bruhl, as well as such famous ethnographers of Africaas Rattray and Junod, Westermann and Edwin Smith.

I lay no claim to having been aware of the bearing of Robertson Smith'sand Fustel's theories on the religious institutions of the Tallensiwhen I studied them in the field. That came much later. It was simplythat ancestor worship was too conspicuous to be missed and that theframework of genealogical bonds and divisions was an aspect of ritualto which both participants and commentators freely drew attention. But given the general orientation I have described, what startedme thinking about the crucial factors of ancestor worship was thecasual observation recorded in the book which originally aroused myinterest in the Tallensi.

In 1932 there appeared the first systematic ethnographical surveyof the tribes of Northern Ghana, R.S. Rattray's Tribesof the Ashanti Hinterland. It is, in fact, a some-what disconnectedcompilation of Rattray's own observations and informants'texts. But with his uncanny knack for field enquiry, in followingup some of the kinship customs of the Nankanse, who are neighboursof the Tallensi and differ little from them in language and culture,Rattray (1932, I, p. 263) discovered a rule which he reports in thesewords:

'Among the Nankanse, as also among many other tribes,it is forbidden for the first-born (male and female) to make use ofany personal property belonging to the parents, e.g. to touch a father'sweapons, put on his cap or skin covering, to look into his grain storeor into his tapo, leather bag, or in the case of thefemale, to pry into her mother's kumpio. "Parentsdo not like their first-born and it is unlikely to live with them." I think [comments Rattrray] the idea is that they are waiting, aswe would say, "to step into the dead man's shoes".'

That parents and children are often opposed and even antagonisticto one another is widely acknowledged. It is a common enough themeof European novels and plays. Anthropologists have long been familiarwith the parallels in primitive society. But its cardinal importancein social life was only beginning to be understood in 1932, partlythrough coming into the limelight of psycho-analysis³ but more particularlythrough the kinship studies of Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown. Radcliffe-Brown'srevolutionary paper on the Mother's Brother (1924) had made us realize thesignificance of respect and avoidance customs as expressions of theauthority held by fathers over children in a patrilineal family structure,and Malinowski (1927) had revealed the conflicts that go or underthe surface of matrilineal kinship norms (cf. Fortes 1957). The Nankansecustom seemed to betray outright hostility between parent and childof the same sex, linked to open admission of the wish for the parent'sdeath. It was curious also in singling out the first-born. No anthropologistalert to the current controversies concerning kinship and family structurecould fail to be intrigued.

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