Fortes, the Segmentary Lineage, and the Shrines It Explains

Tallensi religion is documented chiefly as part of a wider study of kinship rather than as a subject examined for its own sake first. Meyer Fortes, a South African born British social anthropologist, conducted extended fieldwork among the Tallensi of northern Ghana from the 1930s, publishing The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi and The Web of Kinship Among the Tallensi in the late 1940s, and later Oedipus and Job in West African Religion, arguing that Tallensi ancestor worship at bakologo, the lineage shrines built up over generations, could only be properly understood as an expression of the community's segmentary lineage structure, in which authority and identity are organised through branching descent from common ancestors rather than through a central chieftaincy or priesthood.

On Fortes's reading, Naawun, the sky god, stands at some remove from daily religious practice, which is concentrated instead on ancestors specific to a person's own lineage segment, so that Tallensi religion as documented is less a shared pantheon addressed uniformly by the whole community than a set of parallel lineage specific practices that share a common structure and a common sky god without converging on shared, named ancestral figures. Later anthropologists have used the Tallensi case, alongside Fortes's own comparative work on other West African lineage systems, as a reference point for analysing ancestor worship as a social institution rather than as theology in the narrower sense.