Robert Sutherland Rattray, , known as Captain R. S. Rattray (1881 in

India India, officially the Republic of India, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area; the List of countries by population (United Nations), most populous country since ...

– 1938), was a barrister and held a diploma in anthropology from Oxford. Adinkra Rattray

He was an early Africanist and student of the Ashanti. He was one of the early writers on

Oware Oware is an abstract strategy game among the mancala family of board games (pit and pebble games) played worldwide with slight variations as to the layout of the game, number of players and strategy of play. Its origin is uncertain but it is wide ...

, and on Ashanti gold weights. An amusement park constructed by the

Kumasi Kumasi is a city and the capital of the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly and the Ashanti Region of Ghana. It is the second largest city in the country, with a population of 443,981 as of the 2021 census. Kumasi is located in a rain forest region ...

Metropolitan Assembly is named Rattray Park in his memory. Brooklyn Museum 45

Life

Rattray was born in India to Scottish parents. In 1906, he joined the Gold Coast Customs Service. In 1911, he became the Assistant District Commissioner at

Ejura Ejura is a town and the capital of Ejura/Sekyedumase, a district in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Ejura has settlement population of over 130,000 people as of the 2021 population census conducted in Ghana. Ejura is the largest maize producing dis ...

. Learning local languages, he was appointed head of the Anthropological Department of Asante in 1921. He retired in 1930. He was killed while flying a glider in 1938. "When a new Anthropological Department was set up in Ashanti in the 1920s, Rattray was charged with the task of re-searching the law and constitution of Ashanti, to assist the colonial administrators in ruling the Ashantis. With his office in the Anthropological Department in Ashanti, Rattray set out to do detailed and voluminous research on Ashanti religion, customs law, art, beliefs, folktales, and proverbs. His personal contact with the people of Ashanti afforded him an intimate knowledge of their culture, which is reflected in his thoughtful and nuanced writing on them."

Ethnographic collections

Like many anthropologists of his day, Rattray collected many ethnographic artefacts during his time in Africa, took photographs, collected folk tales and language information and experimented with sound recording. These materials mostly ended up in the collections of the

Pitt Rivers Museum Pitt Rivers Museum is a museum displaying the archaeological and anthropological collections of the University of Oxford in England. The museum is located to the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and can only be accessed ...

at the

University of Oxford The University of Oxford is a collegiate university, collegiate research university in Oxford, England. There is evidence of teaching as early as 1096, making it the oldest university in the English-speaking world and the List of oldest un ...

, although smaller collections are found in the

British Museum The British Museum is a Museum, public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human cu ...

and elsewhere. His fieldwork papers are held in the archives of the Royal Anthropological Institute (UK). His sound recordings are archived at the British Library.

Works

*Vernon Blake, "The Aesthetic of Ashanti". * '' Hausa Folk-lore'', translated from Maalam Shaihua's original, 1913, 2 volumes. * ''Ashanti Proverbs: the primitive ethics of a savage people: translated from the original with grammatical and anthropological notes'', 1916 (repub. 1969). With a preface by Sir Hugh Clifford. * ''Ashanti'', 1923. * (ed.) ''Religion and Art in Ashanti'', Oxford University Press, 1927. * ''Ashanti Law and Constitution'', 1929. * ''Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales. Collected and translated by ... R. S. Rattray ... and illustrated by Africans of the Gold Coast Colony'', 1930. * ''The Tribes of the Ashanti Hinterland'' Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2 vols., 1932. * ''An Elementary Mōle Grammar with a Vocabulary of Over 1000 Words for the Use of Officials in the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast''. Clarendon Press, 1918. * ''Ashanti Proverbs (The Primitive Ethics of a Savage People) Translated From the Original With Grammatical and Anthropological Notes.'' (1916).

References

* Noel Machin
''"Government Anthropologist": a life of R.S. Rattray''
1998

External links

* 1881 births 1938 deaths Scottish Africanists Indian Africanists Scottish anthropologists 20th-century Scottish educators 20th-century Scottish writers British people in colonial India British expatriates in Gold Coast (British colony) {{UK-writer-stub