A book containing Meyer Fortes' work on the religion of the Tallensi of northern Ghana is of importance in the first place because it complements those on the political and domestic domains of Tallensi society which he published over thirty years ago (1945, 1949). The present volume, together both with the previous two and with other papers that have appeared over the years, make up one of the most important bodies of ethnographic work ever carried out by a single scholar on a particular people. As such it is comparable in scope to the studies undertaken by his British anthropological contempories, that is, Evans-Pritchard on the Nuer of the Southern Sudan, Firth on the Tikopia in the Pacific, and Gluckman and Richards on the Lozi and Bemba of Zambia respectively.

But while it is ethnographically important to collect together the corpus of work on a people who have become so well known in anthropological studies, not only of Africa but in a much wider comparative sense, to do so also makes a significant theoretical contribution. Fortes was trained as a psychologist as well as being interested in the relation between psychoanalysis and anthropology. This background was of great significance in all his work, but especially so in his study of ritual and religion.

Fortes always intended to write a book on the religion of the Tallensi to complement the two he had published on family and kinship and on political organization.