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MEYER FORTES
It has long been recognized that ancestor worship is a conspicuousfeature of African religious systems (cf. Taylor, 1871, II, p. 115;Smith, 1950). Among the Tallensi of Ghana, as I have shown in previouspublications, it so pervades their social life as to put them on par with the Chinese and the Romans in this respect. To a greateror lesser degree this holds for all the peoples of Negro stock inAfrica.
There is general agreement that, whatever it occurs, ancestor worshipis rooted in domestic, kinship and descent relations, and institutions. It is described by some as an extension of these relations to thesupernatural sphere, by others as a reflection of these relations,yet again as their ritual and symbolic expression.
Comparatively viewed, African ancestor worship has a remarkedly uniformstructural framework. The congregation of worshippers invariablycomprises either an exclusive common descent group, or such a groupaugmented by collateral cognates, who may be of restricted or specificfiliative provenance or may come from an unrestricted range; or elsethe worshippers in a given situation may comprise only a domesticgroup, be it an elementary family to a family of an extended type.
In the paradigmatic case, congregations of the first kind representancestor worship in the structural context of the corporate lineage;and those of the second kind shows us its family context. Here spouses,who are, of course, formally affines, not kin, participate by rightof marriage and parenthood, not of descent or filiation, as do membersof the first kind of congregation.
It may be thought that this paradigm does not apply to the worshipof royal or chiefly ancestors. In fact we can see that it does ifwe look closely at the ethnographic details. The Swazi (cf. Kuper,1947, p. 192) illustrate this. It is the King who appeals to his ancestors on behalf of the nation, as any headman mightdo in the more limited descent group context. At the yearly sacrificeto the royal ancestors each animal 'is dedicated to a specificancestor and may only be eaten by descendants in specific kinshipcategories' (ibid., p. 195). Qua cult, in the strictsense of the offering of ritual tendance and service, the worshipof royal ancestors follows the pattern of family and lineage ancestorworship. Its national significance derives from the political rankof the worshipped ancestors not from their ancestral status.
It could be argued that the delimitation of the group of worshippersby rules of kinship, descent, and marriage is implicit in the veryconcept of ancestor worship. But it is in fact not just tautologouslyimplied. For investigation has shown that a congregation does notoffer ritual service or respect to all their common ancestors in everysituation of worship. The ancestors acknowledged in a given situationare primarily only those who are exclusive to the worshipping groupand therefore distinguish that group unequivocally from collateraland co-ordinate groups of a like sort, who have remoter ascendantsin common with them, and worship jointly with them in situations ofcommon concern. This is well exemplified in segmentary lineage systemswith ancestor worship, where descent divisions of all orders are defined,as Dr. Freedman remarks for the Chinese, 'in terms of the cultof the ancestors'.
This is not the same as the purely mnemonic use and perpetuationof pedigrees and genealogies. They may serve simply as a calculusto distinguish persons and groups for jural purposes such as the assignmentof rights, duties, and status, in relation to property, office, andrank, or for ritual purposes, such as liability to death, birth orcaste pollution, or for establishing titles to membership f a corporategroup. This is not necessarily associated with a religious cult ofancestors. The Tiv (cf. Bohannan, L. and OP., 1953) are a case inpoint, and this is true also of the Nuer (cf. Evans-Pritchard, E.E., 1956, p. 162). There is much more to ancestor worship than itsutility as a means of mapping out and providing a charter for a genealogicallyordered social structure.
Yet ancestor worship strictly defined presupposes geneonymy, thatis the commemoration of ancestors by name. In the paradigmatic case(e.g. of the Tallensi) ancestors are worshipped by name and the namesare perpetuated in the lineage genealogies and personal pedigreesin an accepted generation sequence. Moreover, these genealogies areequally essential for the correct constitution to congregations ofworshippers, for the exact focusing of the their ritual service, andfor the organization of social relations in all domains of socialstructure.
An ancestor is a named, dead forbear who has living descendants ofa designated genealogical class representing his continued structuralrelevance. In ancestor worship such an ancestor receives ritual serviceand tendance directed specifically to him by the proper class of hisdescendants. Being identified by name means that he is invested withattributes distinctive of a kind of person.
I labour what might seem to be a trivial point because confusionhas long prevailed in the literature through equating ancestor worshipwith cults of the dead. Yet Durkheim warned (1913, cf. English translation,19321, p. 62) that 'by itself, death has no deifying virtue';Radcliffe-Brown came close to seizing the point in nothing that 'thebelief in the world of spirits rests on the actual fact that a deadperson continues to affect society' (1922, p. 304); and Gluckman,in following this up (1937), drew attention to differences betweenancestral cults and religious concern with the dead. The distinguishedand erudite authority on Chinese religion and philosophy, J.J. M.De Groot, was typical in his view that 'the worship of the deadin China is the worship of the ancestors' (1910. p. 60); andin African ethnography, to stick to our proper study, Junod'sstill unsurpassed description of a system of ancestor worship quitesimply assumes that death is both the necessary and the sufficientcondition for attaining 'deification' as an ancestor spirit(Junod, 1927, II, P. 424 ff.). If ancestor worship is subsumed underthe worship of the dead then its meaning must be sought in customarybeliefs an practices concerning death, the soul, ghost, spirits, andthe after-life.
But the facts of ethnography and history show that ritual dealingswith ghosts or spirits or shades, whose preterhuman character andexistence is attributed to the transformation brought about by deathand apparently recognized in funerary rites, are not the same as trueancestor cults. The ancient Greeks appear to have had elaborate cultsconcerned with beliefs about ghosts and shades, but no true ancestorcult ( cf. Guthrie). The two are found side by side, but well distinguished,in the religious system of the Chinese, as all our authorities pointout (e.g. De Groot). Nuer sacrifices and prayers evidently expressawe of ghosts of the dead but, as I have already noted, they do nothave ancestor worship. And to turn to West Africa, my impressionis that the Ga have ritual reverence to their dead forbears but donot have an ancestor cult in the precise sense in which I am employingthis term (cf. Field, 1937). Indeed we need look no further afieldthan our own civilization to see the difference. Catholics have acult of saints as Tylor remarked (op. cit.) and say masses for nameddead; Jews commemorate them by name in the course of the celebrationof their New Year and their Day of Atonement, as well as on the anniversariesof particular deaths. Yet we do not consider either Catholics orJews to be ancestor worshippers. Following Tylor, those who regardthe contents of the rites and beliefs and observances as the primaryphenomena of ancestor worship necessarily seek to interpret it asa product of eschatological ideas and of doctrines about souls andspirits. Others follow Malinowski (1925, ch. III) and seek an explanationin the need for emotional reassurance against the loss and againstthe dread of annihilation. I do not say that such considerationsare irrelevant for a complete analysis of ancestor worship. I donot forget that it is a branch of religion and a moral philosophy,not to speak of its functions as a theory of causation. What I wishto bring out is that the structural matrix of ancestor worship whichis my chief concern here, and the code of beliefs, values, and symbolsused in the cult, are analytically distinguishable aspects. Thisis clear if we bear in mind that death is a necessary but not sufficientcondition for the attainment of ancestorhood.
Every culture provides what Dr. Field (op. cit. p[. 93 ff.) has aptlycalled a 'dogma of human personality', that is to say anaccepted formulation, be it pragmatical, mystical, of naturalistic,of the physical and psychical constitution of man. This establishesthe conceptual premises and the symbolic images of the nature, causes,and consequences of death and of the relations between the livingand the dead. It serves as the warrant for the lore and observanceby means of which the experience of the individual's death asirrevocable is reconciled with acquiescence in continuity of the livingcommunity. From a different angle, however, the dogma of personalityis a representation of the social capacities and potentialities withwhich a person is endowed in virtue of his social roles and relationships. Doctrines of the soul and of after-life existence belong not onlyto religion but also to the apparatus of politico-jural and moralcustom by means of which these capacities and potentialities are salvagedand ploughed back into the life of society after the individual'sdeath. Tikopian ideas about the soul are, says Frith (1955), 'restatementsof social structure at a symbolic level'. It is this structuralframework that interests me here.
Thus ancestor worship, though it consists descriptively of ritualrelations with dead forbears, is not co-terminous with the worshipof the dead.
One indication of this, as Gluckman discerned (loc. cit.) is thatfull blown ancestor worship often goes with only the sketchiest loreabout the mode of existence of the dead and a clear distinction, inbelief and ritual, between them and worshipped ancestors. Pressedhard, Tallensi elders are quite ready to surmise that the departedmust exist somewhere, in heaven or in the earth, and no doubt do soin ways that mirror life in this world. Mostly they say, how canwe know? Some speculative elders point out that when a wife diesshe is buried among her husband's kin and is invoked in her funeralrites to join his lineage ancestors, that is her affines. Presumably,therefore, the dead live together in families as they did when alive. But a wife on her death is given two funerals, a primary funeralin her conjugal settlement where she is mourned by her husband andher children,as wife and mother, and a secondary one when she is 'taken backhome' to her paternal lineage. There she is mourned as daughterand sister and is besought to 'reach' her own fathers andforefathers. Has she then, two 'souls', one which goesto join her natal lineage ancestors? No Tallensi would accept thisargument. What is significant for them, as for the observer, is thatcognizance is taken in the rituals that terminate her social existencein the flesh, of the two critical jural statuses a woman passes throughin her life cycle. Again, vague suppositions that animals and libationsoffered to ancestors become their spirit flocks and herds and foodand drink, can be elicited from thoughtful men. But this is not takenas serious doctrine and there is no hint of it in the complex andelaborate rituals, prayers, and observances in which ancestor worshipis daily put into action.
The picture is typical of African ancestor worshippers. The Thonga,according to Junod (pp. 347 ff. vol.2) are just as vague about theafter-life. If anything, they seem to distinguish more preciselybetween the ghostly dead without offspring, whose existence may bea nuisance to the living, and ancestors, who have descendants to bringthem offerings and give them reverent service. The Dahomenas, whosereligious institutions and ideology exhibit refinements not reachedby the more matter-of-fact Tallensi and Thonga, distinguish preciselybetween the dead (chio) and the ancestors (tovodu),and have intricate ceremonies for 'deifying' their deadand so transforming them into ancestors ritually eligible to be worshipped(Herskovits, ch. XI. vol. I). With their subtle theory of the personalityas made up by several souls inhabiting a body mouled out of a substancedescribed as clay, the Dahomeans might be expected to have a richeschatology and a vivid picture of the after-world. These elementsof their religious system are certainly more elaborate than thoseof the Tallensi or Thonga but still meagre and amorphous by contrastwith the ceremonies, rites, and social and political setting of theirancestral cults (Herskovits, vol. II, especially ch. XXXI). Thisis equally true of the Ashanti (cf. Busia and Rattray, 1927). Bothreligious systems have pantheons of gods and nature deities as well as ancestor cults. Yet by comparison, for example, with theGreeks or Hindus their mythologies of the 'spirit world'are thin and unimpressive. Worship in rituals of prayer and sacrifice,the observance of religious prescriptions in the form of taboo andinjunction, and submission to such moral norms as the incest prohibition,may all be validated by reference to what we describe as spiritualbeings, be they gods or ancestors or nature deities. But none ofthis, it is evident, necessitates a circumstantial cosmography ofa 'spirit world'. Religious beliefs and practices can becarried on perfectly well without a doctrine or lore of the natureand mode of existence of the 'beings' to whom they are ostensiblydirected.
In Christian civilization the popular notion of the soul appearsto be that it is a detachable spiritual essence which leaves the bodyon death and then enters on a state of existence which must be accountedfor. This is done by assuming a kind of law of the conservation ofentities in a total universe made up of two complementary regimes,a regime of nature and a regime of deity. By this reckoning soulsare indestructible essences that animate bodies and succeed them inthe timeless realm of God, pending resurrection in a corporeal form. It is therefore logically necessary to account for their immortalityby providing a picture of an after-life, as is done for us by ourmythology and theology.
But we must not project our vulgar cosmology on to other cultures. The concepts of the psychical constituents of personality held bythe Tallensi, the Ashanti, and the Dahomeans, for example, do nothave the metaphysical implications of the Christian notion of thesoul. They refer to activities, relationships, and experiences thatare deemed to fall wholly within the regime of nature. So mortuaryceremonies, though couched in language and rites that appear to personifythe dead, are in fact not directed towards consigning them to, andequipping them for spiritual existence in a supernatural realm, buttowards discorporating them from the social structure. At the personallevel this resolves the dislocation and assuages the grief of bereavement. But death and mortuary rites, though they must precede, do not conferancestorhood. Specific rites are needed for that.The dead has first to be 'brought back home again', re-establishedin the family and lineage, by obsequial rites, and will even thennot receive proper ritual service until he manifests himself in thelife of his descendants and is enshrined (cf. Fortes, 1949, p. 329).
Whena particular deceased - and it is always a particular person - isthus reinstated as an ancestor it is, as I have argued, because hehas living descendants of the right category. His reinstatement inthis status establishes his continued relevance for his society, notas a ghost, but as a regulative focus for the social relations andactivities that persist as the deposit, so to speak, of his life ancareer.
Can we identify the critical characteristics of ancestorhood moreexactly? Ashanti doctrine is quite explicit on this issue. Onlymatrilineal forbears become ancestors who receive worship. So thatconstituent of the personality which is transmitted by the fatherand is symbolized in the ntoro cult and its derivative,the sunsum, is not imagined to survive in a supernaturalrealm after death. Rattray (1923, p. 53) says it is believed to remainbehind to look after persons of the same ntoro. As towhat constituent of the living person is transmuted into an ancestor,our authorities are vague and I myself never succeeded in gettinga coherent account from my informants. As ancestral 'spirit'is not thought of as a kind of nebulous being or personified mysticalpresence but primarily as a name attached to a relic, the stool, standingfor ritual validation of lineage ancestry and for mystical interventionin human affairs. In more concrete terms it is thought of as thecounterpart, in the context of the lineage cult, of the matrilinealcomponent of the living person.
As is well known (cf. Fortes, 1950), an Ashanti father has a speciallyintimate personal relationship with his children during their infancy. He takes a direct responsibility for their upbringing which the mother'sbrother does not normally have. And the unique moral relationshipthus engendered is recognized in the belief that the father'ssunsum influences the well-being of his child becausethey have a common ntoro. It stands to reason that afather will live on in his children's memory much more vividlyand affectionately after his death than will a mother's brother. But it is the latter and not the former who may have a stool dedicatedto him and becomes the ancestor for purposes of worship. For, thoughsome honour their father's memory, 1 ancestor worship bysacrifice, libation, and prayer is a lineage cult; a cult, that is,of the basic politico-jural unit of Ashanti society, not of the domesticunit in which both parents count. In other words, ancestor worshipbelongs to the region of kinship and descent structure in which law,backed by the sanctions of the political order, regulates social relationsand conduct, as opposed to the region of patri-filial relationshipsin which conduct is ruled by moral and spiritual considerations. In this sense, ancestor worship is an aspect of citizenship in thepolitico-jural domain, not of membership or domestic groups.
It is the same in other matrilineal systems, for example, that ofthe Nayar of S.India (cf. Gough, 1958) and the Plateau Tonga (cf.Colson, 1954). Ancestorhood is conferred on persons of the parentalgeneration who have jural authority in living social relations, noton those who imprint their personalities on their off-spring by virtueof their part in bringing them up. Indeed, he rule is more stringentthan this. For among the Ashanti, as among the Nayar, ancestorhooddoes not automatically supervene for everybody who has the statusof a mother's brother. Normally it is only those members ofa lineage who have been invested with authority, i.e. jurisdictionin the lineage, as lineage heads or as the holders of office in theexternal politico-jural domain, who become permanently enshrined instools of worship. The rule applies, of course, equally in the patrilinealdescent systems as was already discerned by Fustel de Coulanges, butwith modifications. In a patrilineal system jural authority and parentalresponsibility are combined in the same persons. But it is only theauthority component of the relationship between successive generationsthat is transformed into ancestorhood (cf.Fortes, 1961).
Before we go further, let us see if the hypothesis is consistentwith the converse of ancestorhood, that is, the status of the worshippers. In the paradigmatic case worshippers stand in a filial or descentrelationship to the ancestors they worship. This principle is ofgeneral application. It is rigorously observed among the Tallensi. Only a son can offer sacrifices to ancestors; and he can do so onlyif his relevant parent is dead, that is, i that parent has becomean ancestor. Sacrifices to be pre-parental ancestor or ancestresscan only be offered through a parent who has become an ancestor. Thus a man cannot offer sacrifices to his patrilineal ancestors ofany generation whatsoever unless his own father is one of them. Hehas the right of ritual access, and the corresponding duties, directlyto his own ancestor-father and calls upon other ancestors throughhim, just as he traces his descent through him. This is the normalrule for all acts and observances of ancestor worship. This is whya man cannot, for example, sacrifice directly to his deceased mother'sbrother, but must have the latter's son do so on his behalf,even if he and his mother's brother had close bonds of affectionand trust during the latter's life.
The apparent exception proves the rule. This is the case where achief, tendaana, or any other lineage head who has thecustody of the lineage boghar, is entitled and boundto officiate in sacrifices to the founding ancestors. He does sothen in his capacity as a successor to office (cf. theparallel case of the Swazi king previously referred to). But we mustremember that a son, among the Tallensi as among other peoples withpatrilineal descent, is a jural minor during his father's life,and becomes sui iuris, jurally autonomous within thelimits of his lineage status, and in virtue of this capable of officiatingin the ancestor cult, only when his father dies. In other words itis a successor to his father's jural status thata son acquires the capacity to act independently in ritual. Hencethe obsequial ceremonies which reinstate a deceased father as an ancestorin his family and lineage end by ritually releasing his eldest sonfrom jural minority and ritual dependence and establish him as hisfather's heir. Jural autonomy is the perquisite condition forentitlement to responsibility in religious matters, shown especiallyin the right to officiate in the ancestorcult; and this is achieved by a step analogous to succession to office. Roman law, with its characteristics sociological exactitude, understoodand recognized this in the concept of the heir as the 'universalsuccessor'. As Maine explains in his beautiful discussion ofTestamentary Succession (ch. VI) the 'prolongation of a man'slegal existence in his heir or in a group of co-heirs' is exactlyparallel to succession in a corporation. Thus in the instance weare discussing a man who accedes to an office vested in a lineageby right of succession has a status relation to his deceased predecessoranalogous to that of a son who steps into his dead father's statusin the domestic group.
Mutatis mutandis, the position is the same in matrilinealsystems. Officiating in ancestor worship, as opposed to participatingin group worship, is the prerogative of succession to the office orstatus of the class of ancestors to whom worship and offerings aregiven in a specific context of social structure and occasion. Reducedto its elementary core, among the Tallensi, the son has the rightand duty to offer prayer and sacrifice directly to the father (andby extension, the father's forefathers) whom he replaces in thesocial structure - the lineage head, directly to the predecessorshe has replaced as lineage head. This is an oversimplified formulationbut it will help to sharpen the analysis. I have, for instance, leftout the ramifications of matrilateral ancestor worship,2 and the qualificationsthat should be made to take account of sibling relations, among theTallensi, as well as considerations of the cult of 'royal'Stools in Ashanti. I refrain, also, from discussing the well-knownfact that women, in such patrilineal systems as that of the Tallensi,have no right to officiate or even to take any autonomous action inthe worship of either their own ancestors or those of their husbands,though they have as close personal relationships with parental kinas their brothers and husbands. The explanation long ago given byFustel de Coulanges, to wit that women have no juridical independence,and therefore no religious status in their own right, holds forAfrican patrilineal descent systems. Nor need I elaborate on thefact that accessory lineages of slave or stranger origin never acquirethe right of direct access to the shrine of the founding ancestorof their host lineage.
All these data point to the same conclusion. Ancestor worship isa representation or extension of the authority component in the juralrelations of successive generations; it is not a duplication, in asuper natural idiom, of the total complex of affective, educative,and supportive relationships manifested in child-rearing, or in marriage,or in any other form of association, however long-lasting and intimate,between kinsmen, neighbours, or friends. It is not the whole man,but only his jural status as the parent (or parental personage, inmatrilineal systems) vested with authority and responsibility, thatis transmuted into ancestorhood.3 It devolves as aninescapable right and duty of worship; and this is quite irrespectiveof what the personal relations of the ancestor and his custodian-worshippermight have been. Hence, not surprisingly, in such a developed systemof ancestor worship as that of the Tallensi, the personality and character,the virtues or vices, success or failures, popularity or unpopularity,of a person during his lifetime makes no difference to his attainmentof ancestorhood. This was repeatedly brought home to me by Tallensielders. A man may be a liar, or a wastrel, or an adulterer, a quarrelsomeneighbour, or a negligent kinsman; he may be a mean and bad-temperedparent who has made his son's life miserable; he may have beenabroad for years and have contributed nothing to their upbringing. If he dies leaving a son he becomes an ancestor of equal standingwith any other ancestor. To put it in the believer's words, heacquires the power to intervene in the life and affairs of his descendantsin exactly the same way as any other ancestor.
On the other hand, a man may be a paragon of virtue, as parent andas kinsman, respected as citizen and successful in his career, ifhe leaves no son he cannot become an ancestor; or, at best, among the Tallensi, if he has a daughter he may become amatrilateral ancestor, of secondary worth only, to her sons and theirdescendants. One of my friends, a man of truly noble character, reveredfor his wisdom and benevolence, and one of his chief's most trustedcouncillors, was pointed out as being in danger of this grievous fatebecause he had no surviving sons; and daughters 'do not inherit'.4
From the opposite side, what holds for ancestors holds reciprocallyfor their descendants. it behoves a son to accept his parental forbears,in their character as ancestors, into his family and lineage, to tendtheir shrines, perform such ritual services for them, as making offeringsand pouring libations when these are demanded, irrespective of hissympathies or aversions, and without regard to his character or achievements. It is the oldest living son who has the main responsibility for theritual tendance and service of his parent ancestors. These dutiesbegin with the obligation to attend to their burial and funeral ritesand continue as the obligation and privilege of being the primaryofficiant in the ritual service rendered by all the members of thefilial-sibling group. Now it makes no difference what sort of personthe eldest son may be. He may be a good-for-nothing, or a half-wit;he may have quarrelled with the dead parent and have left the parentalhome; he may be destitute, a notorious thief, what you will. Theresponsibility for initiating, supervising, and taking the leadingpart in the mortuary and funeral ritual for his parents is unavoidablyhis and so are the consequential, life-long duties of ancestor worship. He can refuse them only at the dire peril of disaster inflicted bythe ancestors; he cannot be deprived of them, except at the dire perilof those who try to do so (cf. Fortes, 1949, 1959).
What must be particularly stressed is that ancestors behave in exactlythe same ways, in the ways expected of them and permitted to themin the ancestral cult, quite irrespective of what their lifetime charactersmight have been. The ancestor who was a devoted father and conscientiousprovider for his family in his lifetime is divined to be the source of illness, misfortune, and disturbancein his descendants' lives in exactly the same way as is an ancestorwho was a scoundrel and spendthrift. No other way of manifestinghimself is open to him. All ancestor spirits exact ritual service,and propitiation in accordance with the same rules of unpredictableand more commonly persecutory rather than beneficent interventionin their descendants' lives.5 From this it is evidentthat a lore or doctrine of an after-life in which rewards and punishmentsare meted out to the dead according to their moral deserts in life,concerns a different sector of religious thought and behaviour thandoes ancestor worship, as we find it among peoples like the Tallensi. And again the reciprocal conditions apply. The troubles and misfortunesattributed to the mystical intervention of ancestors are the samefor descendants who are upright and scrupulous in their moral conductand social relations as for descendants who are wicked and lax.
This is consistent with the principle that ancestors are deemed tobe equally the source of misfortunes interpreted as retribution forfailure in religious submission and service, whether this failureis witting or unwitting. The ancestors persecute in the etymologicalsense of persistently following and harrying their descendants; theydo not punish for wickedness or reward for virtues, as these are definedby human standards (cf. Fortes, 1959). Thus homicide, among the Tallensi,must be ritually expiated whether or not it is deliberate or unintentional. This is done not because it is wicked to kill a man, but becauseit is sinful to pollute the Earth with human blood or to commit suchan outrage against the supreme law of kinship amity.
Furthermore, there is an established order of precedence in this. As one might expect, it is the reciprocal of the order of precedencein worship. Ancestors can, ideally, only intervene in the life ofdescendants through the intermediation of the deceased parents ofthe right category through whom they are approached in worship. Naturally,too, the person who has, by right of succession, the right to officiatein their worship also bears the main burden of accountability to them. His faults of negligence aremore apt to be invoked if things go wrong with any of his dependantsthan their own. Even adults who are jural minors (e.g. married youngerbrothers or sons of the head of a family) are only indirectly accountableto the ancestors when ill befalls them. In short, the persecutingancestor is not a supernatural being capriciously punishing wrong-doingor rewarding virtue. He is rather to be thought of as an ultimatejudge and mentor whose vigilance is directed towards restoring orderand discipline in compliance with the norms of right and duty, amityand piety, whenever transgressions threaten or occur. When misfortuneoccurs and is interpreted as a punitive, or to be more exact, correctiveintervention by the ancestors, they are believed to have acted rightfully,not wantonly. Moreover, they are subject to the moral constraintthat emanates from faithful worship. Though one cannot be certainthat one's offerings and tendance will gain their benevolence,one can rest assured that they will bind the ancestors to act justly(cf. Fortes, 1959).
There is clear logic in this. For in everyday experience authorityis made patent more obviously in disciplinary actions than in indulgence. A parent shows his authority and asserts the rule of right when hegives commands and when he punishes disobedience, not when he is affectionateand protective. A chief's authority is similarly evinced whenhe exacts services or inflicts penalties for wrong doing. Such demonstrationsof authority may be very infrequent, as is the case among the Tallensi,but if they are not known to be possible and legitimate, authoritywilts. Benevolence and affection, hospitality and largesse, are necessaryconcomitants of authority but their function is only to make it tolerable.
Considered in relation to the social structure, therefore, ancestorworship, among such peoples as those who have been discussing, canbe described as [inter alia] a body of religious beliefsand ritual practices, correlated with rules of conduct, which servesto entrench the principle of jural authority together with its corollary,legitimate right, and its reciprocal, designated accountability, asan indisputable and sacrosanct value-principleof the social system.6 In these societies,jural authority implies not only control but responsibility and restson mutuality of rights and duties. It is effective because he whoholds authority is himself bound to superior authority and is bothentitled and obliged to invoke this superior authority as the sanctionof his status. He can fulfil his responsibilities with authority,if I might put the matter somewhat paradoxically, because the ultimateresponsibility lies outside his control.
In these societies, the kind of authority and right here at issueis generated and exercised through social relations created by kinshipand descent. Jural authority vests in a person by virtue of kinshipstatus or of office that, in the last resort, depends upon descent. Ancestors symbolize the continuity of the social structure, and theproper allocation, at any given time, of the authority and right theyheld and transmitted. ancestor worship puts the final source of juralauthority and right, or to use the more inclusive term, jurisdiction,on a pedestal, so to speak, where it is inviolable and unchallengeable,and thus able to mobilize the consent of all who must comply withit.
In presenting this hypothesis, I lean, appropriately, on no lessa guide than Maine. Discussing the unilateral limitation of agnationhe declares that this ensues because the foundation of agnation isnot the marriage of the Father and Mother, but the authority of theFather' and pursuing the topic further he concludes: 'TheParental Powers proper are extinguished by the death of the Parent,but agnation is as it were a mould which retains their imprint afterthey have ceased to exist' (Maine op. cit., pp. 123-4). I havesimply applied these dicta to the religious aspects of descent.
This leads me to a speculation which, I believe, deserves closerconsideration. It seems to me that we have in all societies somethinglike a general faculty, or factor, or jural authority orjurisdiction, ius per se. It pervades all social relationsbut is, of course, only recognized and experienced in particular contextsand situations, and in specific rules of conduct.
Lest this should be dismissed as another one of those 'bloodlessabstractions' attributed to structuralist anthropology, I shouldlike to draw attention to some parallels. One such parallel is thepostulate of the Rule of Law in complex democratic societies. ThusWeldon (1946, p. 243) observes that 'the Rule of Law is investedwith peculiar sanctity just because it is held that the law guaranteesthe inviolability of the individual...' More pertinent is Gluckman'sdiscussion of the Lozi concept of the law as the quintessence of thecorpus juris (1955). As he notes (p. 164) the word mulaois used by the Lozi 'to describe all the rules and the wholeprocedure by which their society is controlled: thus they say, "eventhe king is the slave of the law (mulao)". Theconcept mulao, he comments (p. 226), 'is a multipleconcept covering all kinds of ordered regularity and authoritativeaction' (my italics). I am reminded of the Tale wordmalung which can be translated as 'ritually obligatory'but is often used to account for anything that is felt to be customarilyobligatory. Again, there are the two terms buurt, right,and yuko, authority. Thus a chief awards buurtto the party in the right in a dispute that comes before him, andhe does so in virtue of yuko; a lineage head is exercisingyuko when he accepts the placation gift from a suitorfor the hand of a daughter of the lineage; and the same term is usedfor anyone who is entitled to give orders to others. In Ashanti,the notion of the Stool as the sacred vehicle of the presence of theancestors and both the source and the symbol of politico-ritual office,from the kingship down to the headship of a local lineage, embodiesthe same idea. Ashanti political and jural organization is permeatedwith the notion of the sanctity of ancestrally-ordained authority,as the institution of the oath graphically illustrates (cf. Rattray,1929, passim).
It is not too far-fetches, then, to suppose that some notion of apervasive principle of authority, or as I have called it, jurisdiction,is apprehended, however loosely, in African societies. But what mustbe stresses is that its operation is experienced piecemeal, in particular situations, and that it is respected and complied within relation to the particular persons, offices, or institutions inwhich it is vested for the time being. In these situation, jurisdictionis accepted by reference to sanctions deployed from the outside andto the symbols and usages that identify status and office; but itis also complied with by reason of habits, beliefs, and sentimentsthat are ingrained in the individual. In the domain of kinship anddescent we are concerned with jurisdiction vested in parents and parentalagencies and channelled through the social relations engendered byparenthood. But this jurisdiction, and the matrix of social relationsin which it functions, outlasts the occasions on which it comes intoplay and, what is more, the persons engaged. Succession ensures thatauthority and right do not die with the bodily demise of men who havethem. Descent ensures that the matrix of social relations remainsmore or less constant through the passage of generations. And thenuclear context of relationship for the incidence and experience ofjurisdiction, as well for its transmission, considered both structurally,at a given time, and genetically, over a stretch of time, is the relationshipof successive generations. The condition of filial dependence, frominfancy to adulthood, is the model of subordination to authority throughoutthe domain of kinship and descent. Hence the experienceof filial dependence, as recognized and interpreted by the culture,provides the material for the code of symbolism and ritual by meansof which reverence for authority can be regularly affirmed and enacted. For it is in this experience that the beliefs and sentiments of respect,reverence, and worship are inculcated.
The experience of filial dependence among the Tallensi is markedby ambivalence, as i have shown elsewhere (1949), and this is reflectedin the images of the ancestors and the attributes given to them inTale ancestor worship. Authority and right may be accepted as just;they cannot but be felt at times to be coercive and arbitrary. Theavoidance and respect behaviour required of children towards theirparents is well designed to deflect opposition to living authoritywhen it is felt to be coercive. To counterbalance latent oppositionand secure loyalty in spiteof it, familiarity and affection are also evoked and allowed conventionalexpression. In their ancestor worship Tallensi make clear to themselvesthe fact that, though parents depart, the authority and jurisdictionthey wielded - and which enabled them also to be protective and benevolent- still goes on. The symbolism and imagery used to this end purportto state that it is the parents themselves who survive in transmutedform and become accessible in the material objects dedicated to them. What in fact survives is the web of kinship and descent relationshipsgenerated by the parents and the filial experiences standardized inthe norms, values, and beliefs inculcated by them. Ancestors areapt to be demanding, persecutory, and interfering for one reason becauseparents appear thus to their children when they are exercising authorityover them, but also, in the wider sense, because this is a particularlyeffective way of representing the sovereignty or authority and right.
These reflections leave open some difficult questions. How doesparental and lineage authority, as projected in ancestor worship,link up with political authority and its ritual symbolism and representationas in some forms of African kingship? Again, what is the nature ofauthority and what representation, if any, does it have in religiousor ideological terms in genealogically based social systems like thoseof the Tiv and the Nuer which lack both ancestor worship and the equivalentof kingship? Is it that jurisdiction, in these societies, is so diffusedand so collective as to rule out specific attribution and representationof authority?
In conclusion, I believe that the analysis I have put forward canusefully be extended to features of ancestor worship I have not dealtwith. Take the crucial ritual institution of ancestor worship, thesacrifice. If we think of it as a mode of ritual reparation incumbenton every successor to authority, we can see that it may be connectedwith the hazards of succession. Succession means ousting a predecessor,even though it is lawful and inevitable. It is thus a reminder ofthe transience of authority and the dangers of arousing oppositionto it. Tallensi point this out, saying, for example, that men whohave the custody of the ancestor shrines have a heavy responsibilitybecause they are more exposed to the demands of the ancestors than are other people. Moreover,they arouse jealousy among their peers, and though this does not endangertheir lives, it is irksome. So it is only a safeguard for anyonein authority to show that he is himself the servant of higher authority,but it may be a reassurance to himself to be able to make the kindof reparation to his displaced predecessor which the beliefs and practicesrelating to sacrifice make possible. Here we trench on problems thatcall for psychological analysis, as indeed any comprehensive studyof ancestor worship will be bound to do.
1949. The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi,London.1950. 'Kinship and Marriage among the Ashanti' in AfricanSystems of Kinship and Marriage, ed. Radcliffe-Brown and Forde.
1959. ??dipus and Job in West African Religion, Cambridge
1961. 'Pietas in Ancestor Worship'. J. Royal Anth.Inst., vol. 91.2,pp. 166-91.
1955. The Judical Process among the Barotse,Manchester.
1927. Religion and Art in Ashanti,Oxford.1929. Ashanti Law and Constitution, Oxford.
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