¹ My thinking on these matters has been influenced by discussions with J. Rice, I. Wilks and L. Yarak. I should like to acknowledge all three, but hasten to absolve them of responsibility for the conclusions drawn in this paper.

² Key texts – drawn from a burgeoning literature – include: Augé, M., Théorie des pouvoirs et idéologie: Etude de cas en Côte-d'Ivoire (Paris, 1975);Google Scholar Godelier, M., Rationalité et irrationalité en économie (Paris, 1966)Google Scholar and Horizon, trajets marxistes en anthropologie (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar; Meillassoux, C., Anthropologie économique des Gouro de Côte-d'Ivoire: de l'economie de subsistance à l'agriculture commerciale (Paris, 1964)Google Scholar and Femmes, greniers et capitaux (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar; Rey, P. P., Colonialisme, néocolonialisme et transition au capitalisme (Paris, 1971);Google Scholar Terray, E., L'organisation sociale des Dida (Abidjan, 1969)Google Scholar and Le marxisme devant les sociétés ‘primitives’ (Paris, 1969).Google Scholar Representative collections include: Bloch, M., ed., Marxist Analyses and Social Anthropology (London, 1975)Google Scholar; Clammer, J., ed., The New Economic Anthropology (London, 1978);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Meillassoux, C., ed., L'esclavage en Afrique précoloniale (Paris, 1975)Google Scholar; Seddon, D., ed., Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology (London, 1978).Google Scholar For the most recent statements see the papers collected in Lap;Homme, xviii, iii–iv (1978) and Critique of Anthropology, iv, xiii–xiv (1979).

³ On the whole, with the possible exception of Terray's work on the Abron kingdom of Gyaman, these anthropologists have yet to tackle an African society possessed of a highly developed and complex political superstructure. For some brief but leading remarks see Yarak, L. and Rice, J., The State in Pre-Capitalist Society: Politics and Class Formation on the Periphery of World Capitalism, paper presented to the A.S.A. Spring Symposium (Champaign–Urbana, 1977).Google Scholar These anthropologists, moreover, evidence a somewhat ambiguous attitude towards historical reconstruction; here one may point, perhaps, to the powerful influence of L. Althusser, whose abstractions have only recently begun to be countered by concerned historians. See Thompson, E. P., The Poverty of Theory (London, 1978)Google Scholar and, for the debate, recent issues of New Left Review and New Statesman.

⁴ On women see Paulme, D., ed., Women of Tropical Africa (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Rosaldo, M. Z. and Lamphere, L., eds., Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford, 1974)Google Scholar; Reiter, R. R., ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women (New York and London, 1975);Google Scholar Ardener, S., ed., Perceiving Women (New York and London, 1975)Google Scholar; Hafkin, N. J. and Bay, E. G., eds, Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change (Stanford, 1976);Google Scholar Ardener, S., ed., Defining Females: The Nature of Women in Society (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Burman, S., ed., Fit Work for Women (Canberra, 1979).Google Scholar If anything, the new ‘social history’ has generated an even larger literature. I can only draw attention here to contributions to a number of journals: Journal of Social History; Journal of Interdisciplinary History; Comparative Studies in Society and History; (occasionally) History Workshop.

⁵ Some recognition of the problems is to be found in the Editorial and papers collected in Critique of Anthropology, ‘Women's issue’, iii, ix-x (1977).Google Scholar

⁶ Judt, T., ‘A Clown in Regal Purple: Social History and the Historians’, History Workshop, VII (1979), 66–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For the specific case of Africa attention should be drawn to Bernstein, H. and Depelchin, J., ‘The Object of African History: a Materialist Perspective’, History in Africa: a Journal of Method, v (1978), 1–19, and vi (1979), 17–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁷ Key texts include: Rattray, R. S., Ashanti (Oxford, 1923)Google Scholar; Religion and Art in Ashanti (Oxford, 1927)Google Scholar; Ashanti Law and Constitution (Oxford, 1929)Google Scholar; Fortes, M., ‘The Ashanti social survey: a preliminary report’, Rhodes-Livingstone Journal, vi (1948), 1–36Google Scholar; ‘Kinship and Marriage among the Ashanti’, in Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. and Forde, D., eds., African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (London, 1950)Google Scholar; ‘A demographic field study in Ashanti’, in Lorimer, F., ed., Culture and Human Fertility (Paris, 1954);Google Scholar ‘The submerged descent line in Ashanti’, in Schapera, I., ed., Studies in Kinship and Marriage (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Kinship and the Social Order: The Legacy of Lewis Henry Morgan (London, 1969);Google Scholar Time and Social Structure and Other Essays (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Busia, K. A., The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political System of Ashanti (London, 1951)Google Scholar; ‘ The Ashanti of the Gold Coast’, in Forde, D., ed., African Worlds: Studies in the Cosmological Ideas and Social Values of African Peoples (London, 1954)Google Scholar; Kyerematen, A. A. Y., Inter-State Boundary Litigation in Ashanti (Leiden and Cambridge, 1971).Google Scholar Mention should also be made– because of its enormous influence – of Fortes, M. and Evans-Pritchard, E. E., eds., African Political Systems (London, 1940).Google Scholar For the legacy of ‘functionalism’ see the essays collected in Goody, J., ed., Changing Social Structure in Ghana: Essays in the Comparative Sociology of a New State and an Old Tradition (London, 1975).Google Scholar

⁸ A full account is beyond the scope of this paper, but see the essays collected in Current Anthropology, ix (1968)Google Scholar;Firth, R., ‘The Sceptical Anthropologist: Social Anthropology and Marxist Views on Society’, Proceedings of the British Academy, lviii (1972)Google Scholar;Leclerc, G., Anthropologie et Colonialisme (Paris, 1972)Google Scholar;Asad, T., ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London, 1973).Google Scholar

⁹ Royal Anthropological Institute (London), MSS and Notebooks of Robert Sutherland Rattray.

¹⁰ For evaluations of Rattray see Laue, T. H. Von, ‘Transubstantiation in the Study of African Reality’ and ‘Anthropology and Power: R. S. Rattray among the Ashanti’, African Affairs, lxxv (1975) and lxxvi (1976).Google Scholar See too my own ‘R. S. Rattray (1881–1938) and the construction of Asante history: an appraisal’, in N. Machin, ed., R. S. Rattray: Memorial Essays (forthcoming).

¹¹ For some historical account of the matter see General State Archives, The Hague, WIC 97, Van Sevenhuysen to the Assembly of Ten, dd. Elmina, 21 June 1700, 30 May and 16 November 1701; WIC 98, De La Palma to the Assembly of Ten, dd. Elmina, 26 June and 17 July 1702.

¹² Rattray, , Ashanti Law, 73–4.Google Scholar

¹³ Some discussion of this is to be found in Wilks, I., ‘The Development of Early Akan Society’, paper presented to the Workshop on the Akan (Northwestern, 1978).Google Scholar Rattray's discussions of Asante ‘feudalism’ would repay further scholarly attention in this context.

¹⁴ Rattray, , Ashanti Law, especially chapters ix–xvi.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Fortes, M., ‘Family Studies in Ghana 1920–70’, in – Oppong, , ed., Legon Family Research Papers: Domestic Rights and Duties in Southern Ghana (Legon, 1974), 1–27Google Scholar and especially p. 6. In this fascinating essay Fortes makes explicit the ‘descent structure’ of social anthropological work among the Akan; he also offers a brief but spirited rebuttal of the attempt to implicate ‘functionalism’ in colonialism.

¹⁶ Freedman, M., Main Trends in Social and Cultural Anthropology (New York and London, 1979), 73.Google Scholar Freedman is particularly good on the survival of a subterranean ‘functionalism’ in more recent forms of social inquiry, and notably ‘structuralism’. See further Martindale, D., ed., Functionalism in the Social Sciences (New York and Philadelphia, 1965).Google Scholar

¹⁷ The most distilled statement is Fortes, Kinship and the Social Order. Fortes, M., ‘Custom and Conscience in Anthropological Perspective’, International Review of Psycho-Analysis, iv (1977), 127–54Google Scholar, gives some idea of the intellectual wellsprings of the author's approach and concerns.

¹⁸ James, W., ‘Matrifocus on African Women’, in Ardener, Defining Females, 150.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Some of the confusions are evident in the corpus of 215 stool histories collected in Asante by J. Agyeman-Duah of the Institute of African Studies, Legon. These, however, in my opinion, if read sensitively against a background of comparative source material, have considerable utility; others disagree. Seec Henige, D., The Chronology of Oral Tradition: Quest for a Chimera (Oxford, 1974)Google Scholar, especially pp. 166–89. Illuminating on the general point are Owusu, M., ‘Ethnography of Africa: the Usefulness of the Useless’, American Anthropologist, lxxxx, ii (1978), 310–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Armah, A. Kwei, The Healers (Nairobi, 1978)Google Scholar – a novel dealing with the Anglo-Asante war of 1873–4.

²⁰ I have expanded on this point in ‘Office, Land and Subjects in the History of the Manwere fekuo of Kumase: an Essay in the Political Economy of the Asante State’, J. Afr Hist, xxi, ii (1980), 189–208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The most recent ‘honourable exception’ which I have read is Cohen, D. W., Womunafu's Bunafu: A Study of Authority in a Nineteenth-Century African Community (Princeton, 1977).Google Scholar

²¹ McCaskie, ‘Office, Land and Subjects’.

²² See inter alia Lewin, T., ‘The Structure of Political Conflict in Asante 1875–1900’, (Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern, 1974)Google Scholar and Asante before the British: The Prempean Years 1875–1900 (Kansas, 1978)Google Scholar; Aidoo, A. A., ‘Political Crisis and Social Change in the Asante Kingdom 1867–1901’, Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles (1975)Google Scholar; Wilks, I., Asante in the Nineteenth Century: the Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge, 1975)Google Scholar;McCaskie, T. C., ‘The Paramountcy of the Asantehene Kwaku Dua Panin (1834–67): a Study in Asante Political Culture’, Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge (1974).Google Scholar

²³ The most notable addition to the sources has been the extensive holdings of the Manhyia Record Office, Kumase. Some indication of the recent direction of Asante studies may be gleaned from Wilks, I. and McCaskie, T. C., eds., Asantesɛm: the Bulletin of the Asante Collective Biography Project, i-xi (1975–1979).Google Scholar Wilks and McCaskie are currently preparing a book on the methodology, sources and findings of the ACBP.

²⁴ Rattray, , Ashanti Law, 1.Google Scholar

²⁵ Wilks, I., ‘Land, Labour, Capital and the Forest Kingdom of Asante: a Model of Early Change’, in Friedman, J. and Rowlands, M., eds., The Evolution of Social Systems (London, 1978), 487–534.Google Scholar See too Kea, R. A., ‘Trade, State Formation, and Warfare on the Gold Coast 1600–1826’, Ph.D. thesis, London (1974)Google Scholar; ‘Social and Spatial Aspects of Production in Southern Ghana in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, paper presented to the Workshop on the Akan (Northwestern, 1978); ‘Land, Overlords and Cultivators in the Seventeenth Century Gold Coast’, unpublished paper (1979). I should like to record my gratitude here to Dr Kea whose unrivalled knowledge of early Gold Coast history has made scholarly debtors of all those interested in the past of the Akan.

²⁶ See indicatively Douglas, M., ‘Is Matriliny Doomed in Africa?’, in Douglas, M. and Kaberry, P. M., eds., Man in Africa (London, 1969), 121–35.Google Scholar

²⁷ Wilks, ‘Land, Labour’. For the detailed history of one matriclan see McCaskie, T. C., ‘The Dynastic Politics of the oman of Mampon: an Essay in the Regional History of Asante’, Asantesɛm, xii (1980), forthcoming.Google Scholar

²⁸ Wilks, ‘Land, Labour’.

²⁹ See Manhyia Record Office (Kumase), The History of the Ashanti Kings and the Whole Country Itself, by Asantehene Agyeman Prempe, commenced 6 August 1907; The History of Asante (MS), prepared by a Committee of Traditional Authorities under the Chairmanship of Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, n.d.; History of the Immigrants from Takyiman (typescript), ed. Asantehene Osei Agyeman Prempeh II, n.d.

³⁰ Basehart, H. W., ‘Ashanti’, in Schneider, D. M. and Gough, K., eds., Matrilineal Kinship (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1962), 270.Google Scholar In the same volume attention should be paid to Aberle, D., ‘Matrilineal Descent in Cross-cultural Perspective’, 655–727.Google Scholar

³¹ Busia, Position of the Chief.

³² See Christaller, J. G., A Collection of three thousand and six hundred Tshi Proverbs (Basel, 1879);Google Scholar Rattray, R. S., Ashanti Proverbs: the Primitive Ethics of a Savage People (Oxford, 1906)Google Scholar; for a recent discussion of some of the issues by an Akan philosopher see Wiredu, K., Philosophy and an African Culture (Cambridge, 1980).Google Scholar

³³ Wilks, ‘Land, Labour’; McLeod, M. D., ‘Aspects of Asante Images’, in Greenhalgh, M. and Megaw, V., eds., Art in Society (London, 1978), 305–16;Google Scholar ‘Verbal Elements in West African Art’, Quaderni Poro, I (1976), 85–102.Google Scholar

³⁴ The ‘cool’ village was symbolically and physically separated from the ‘hot’ bush by small fences (pampim). The bush was understood to be full of entities – sasabonsam, mmoatia, sasa – inimical and hostile to man. McLeod has argued, and I agree with him completely, that ‘the key categorical division’ in Asante is between things of the village and things of the bush.

³⁵ Gros, J., Voyages, Aventures et Captivité de. J Bonnat chez les Achantis (Paris, 1884), 194–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁶ McCaskie, , ‘Office, Land and Subjects’; I. Wilks, ‘The Golden Stool and the Elephant Tail: an Essay on Wealth in Asante’, in Dalton, G., ed., Research in Economic Anthropology, II (1979), 1–36.Google Scholar For the career of Kwasi Brantuo see ACBP/pcs/51, Asantesem, vii (1977), 14–17; for Opoku Frɛfrɛ, ACBP/pcs/i, Asantesɛm, xi (1979), 38–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁷ Thus, only three individuals – Kwasi Brantuo, Opoku Frɛfrɛ, Ankobeahene Kwaku Tawia – are known to have received the mena in the nineteenth century.

³⁸ There is considerable but unexplored material in the sources on differentiation in diet and alimentary consumption.

³⁹ Gros, , Voyages, 206.Google Scholar For a highly detailed but curiously romanticized view of marriage and the domestic round see Perregaux, E., ‘Chez les Achanti’, Bulletin de la Société neuchâteloise de Géographie, xvii (1906), 1–314.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ The number of the Asantehene's wives was customarily – but not realistically – set at an upper limit of 3,333. For an authoritative discussion see The History of Asante (MS), and especially the remarks on Asantehene Kusi Obodom (1750–64).

⁴¹ The events leading up to the trial of Apea Nyanyo are described in General State Archives, the Hague, , KvG 349, Diary of W. Huydecoper, 28 April 1816–18 May 1817, tr. Irwin, G. (Legon, 1962).Google Scholar For the trial see Bowdich, T. E., Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee (London, 1819), 129.Google Scholar

⁴² Methodist Missionary Society (London), Picot to Boyce, Cape Coast, 3 May 1876. For the history of this initiative see McCaskie, , ‘Paramountey’, 211–14Google Scholar and ACBP/pcs/12, Agyeman, Kwame Poku, Asantesɛm, xii, (1980) forthcoming.Google Scholar

⁴³ For Adu Bofo see ACBP/pcs/2, Asantesɛm, I (1975), 10–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for Kwabena Awua see ACBP/pcs/47, Asanteɛm x (1979), 21–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁴⁴ McCaskie, T. C., interviews with I. K. Agyeman, Kumase, 1975–1976.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ See ACBP/pcs/45, Asantsɛm, xii (1980), forthcoming.

⁴⁶ For detailed charges of Kwame Tua's extortion of £1,597.– 7–6 see National Archives of Ghana (Kumase), D.68i, Kwabena Asubonten and others to CCA., Kumase, 10 September 1905. Among the ahenemma known to have been married by Kwame Tua were Yaa Difie; Afua of Breman; Afua of Atrama; Yaa of Asokwa; and Amma Benehene, a daughter of Asantehene Kofi Kakari.

⁴⁷ McCaskie, T. C., ‘Social Rebellion and the Inchoate Rejection of History: Some Reflections on the Career of Opon Asibe Tutu’, Asantesɛm, iv (1976), 34–8.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Minutes of the Eighth Session of the Ashanti Confederacy Council, Kumase, 21 and 25 February, 4–7 and ii March 1946.

⁴⁹ Individual cases – of very different types – are to be found in Basel Mission Archives (Basel), Annual Reports from Kumase, 1902–10; Tooth, G., Studies in Mental Illness in the Gold Coast (London, 1950).Google Scholar

⁵⁰ See conveniently Bowdich, Mission, 260 and 302.

⁵¹ On ranking see Wilks, I., ‘Asante Officialdom: a note on scaling by rank’, and ‘Asante officialdom: a further note on ranking’, Asantesɛm, ii (1975), 18–20 and vii (1977), 19–21.Google Scholar

⁵² Bowdich, Mission, 383, but see ibid. 259; Cruickshank, B., Eighteen Years on the Gold Coast of Africa (London, 1853), ii, 191–2Google Scholar; Ellis, A. B., The Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast of West Africa (London, 1887), 281–2;Google Scholar figures in the same range are scattered throughout the case histories in Manhyia Record Office (Kumase) and the correspondence in Basel Mission Archives (Basel).

⁵³ Instituut voor Taal–, Land–, en Volkenkunde, Leiden, MS H-509, Heer, P. de, Aanhangsel: Journale gehouden te Comassee door eenen tapoeier (1866–1867).Google Scholar

⁵⁴ ACBP/pcs/72, Kwasi Kankam (in course of active preparation). The basic adultery story is told in Bowdich, , Mission, 96–7.Google Scholar

⁵⁵ Dupuis, J., Journal of a Residence in Ashantee (London, 1824), 36–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁶ On nubility rites and marriage see in general Sarpong, P., Girls' Nubility Rites in Ashanti (Accra–Tema, 1977)Google Scholar; a very full account from the early twentieth century is in Basel Mission Archives (Basel), Annual Reports from Kumase, 1902–10, D.182 (1905).

⁵⁷ Rattray, , Ashanti and Religion and Art, especially 76–7.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Bowdich, , Mission, 302Google Scholar and see also 383. For a general discussion of related phenomena on the nineteenth-century Gold Coast see Kaplow, S. B., ‘Primitive accumulation and traditional social relations on the nineteenth century Gold Coast’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue Canadienne des Etudes Africaines, xii, i (1978), 19–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵⁹ The bulk of the evidence deployed comes from Manhyia Record Office (Kumase), Court Record Book 4, in re Pampasohene Osei Yaw vs. Atenehene Yaw Bredwa, commenced 5 July 1928; supplementary biographical material is drawn from the files of the ACBP; a fuller account than the one offered here is to be found in ACBP/pcs/34, Nkyera, Yaw, Asantesɛm, v (1976), 10–13Google Scholar; a relevant account is ACBP/pcs/i6, Agyepon, Kwame, Asantesɛm, xii (1980), forthcoming.Google Scholar