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Sir John Rankine Goody FBA (27 July 1919 – 16 July 2015) was an English social anthropologist. He was a prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984.

Key Information

Among his main publications were Death, property and the ancestors (1962), Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa (1971), The myth of the Bagre (1972) and The domestication of the savage mind (1977).[2]

Early life and education

[edit]

Born on 27 July 1919, he was the son of Harold Goody (1885–1969) and Lilian Rankine Goody (1885–1962). Goody grew up in Welwyn Garden City and St Albans, where he attended St Albans School. He went up to St John's College, Cambridge to study English literature in 1938, where he met leftist intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson.

Military service

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Goody left university to fight in World War II.[3] Following officer training, he was commissioned into the Sherwood Foresters (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment), British Army, on 23 March 1940 as a second lieutenant.[4] Fighting in North Africa, he was captured by the Germans and spent three years in prisoner-of-war camps.[5] At the end of the war he held the rank of lieutenant.[6] Following his release, he returned to Cambridge to continue his studies.[3]

He officially relinquished his commission on 19 January 1952.[6]

Academic career

[edit]

Inspired by James George Frazer's Golden Bough and the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, he transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology when he resumed university study in 1946. Meyer Fortes was his first mentor in Social Anthropology. After fieldwork with the LoWiili and LoDagaa peoples in northern Ghana, Goody increasingly turned to comparative study of Europe, Africa and Asia.

Between 1954 and 1984, he taught social anthropology at Cambridge University, serving as the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 until 1984.[7] He gave the Luce Lectures at Yale University—Fall 1987.

Goody has pioneered the comparative anthropology of literacy, attempting to gauge the preconditions and effects of writing as a technology. He also published about the history of the family and the anthropology of inheritance. More recently, he has written on the anthropology of flowers and food.

Later life

[edit]

Goody died on 16 July 2015, aged 95. His funeral was held on 29 July at the West Chapel, Cambridge City Crematorium.[5]

Honours

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In 1976, Goody was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).[2] He was an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. In the 2005 Queen's Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor "for services to Social Anthropology", and therefore granted the use of the title sir.[8] In 2006, he was appointed Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic.[3]

Works

[edit]

Jack Goody explained social structure and social change primarily in terms of three major factors. The first was the development of intensive forms of agriculture that allowed the accumulation of surplus – surplus explained many aspects of cultural practice from marriage to funerals as well as the great divide between African and Eurasian societies. Second, he explained social change in terms of urbanisation and growth of bureaucratic institutions that modified or overrode traditional forms of social organisation, such as family or tribe, identifying civilisation as "the culture of cities". And third, he attached great weight to the technologies of communication as instruments of psychological and social change. He associated the beginnings of writing with the task of managing surplus and, in a paper with Ian Watt (Goody and Watt 1963), he advanced the argument that the rise of science and philosophy in classical Greece depended on the invention of the alphabet. As these factors could be applied to any contemporary social system or to systematic changes over time, his work is equally relevant to many disciplines.[9]

Books

[edit]

Selected articles

[edit]

Notes

[edit]
[edit]
Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Jack Goody

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Sir John Rankine Goody FBA (27 July 1919 – 16 July 2015), known professionally as Jack Goody, was a British social anthropologist who specialized in comparative studies of literacy, kinship systems, and the historical dynamics of social structures across Eurasian and African societies.
Born in London to a middle-class family, Goody conducted extensive ethnographic fieldwork in northern Ghana among the LoDagaa and Gonja peoples, which informed his early analyses of inheritance, death rituals, and lineage organization in non-literate societies.
His seminal works, including Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962) and The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), explored how writing technologies and intensive agricultural production shaped cognitive processes, property relations, and state formation, challenging dichotomies between "primitive" oral cultures and "advanced" literate ones.
Goody's broader comparative historical anthropology critiqued Eurocentric narratives by highlighting convergent developments in family structures, marriage strategies, and economic modes across Eurasia, while attributing divergences to empirical factors like plow agriculture and script usage rather than inherent cultural superiorities.
As William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge from 1973 to 1984, he influenced interdisciplinary debates on communication modes and social reproduction, producing over two dozen books that emphasized causal mechanisms in historical divergence over ideologically laden exceptionalism.

Personal Background

Early Life and Family

John Rankine Goody, known professionally as Jack Goody, was born on 27 July 1919 in , , to Harold Ernest Goody and Lilian Rankine Goody. His father, Harold, worked as a manager at the Lamp Company and as a technical journalist, while his mother, Lilian, was a civil servant who was among the first women to pass the British civil service examinations; she was of Scottish descent, with family roots near the English-Scottish border. The family belonged to the English , and both parents had limited formal , leaving school at age 14, yet they emphasized ambition and self-improvement in their household. Goody grew up primarily in , , before the family relocated to St Albans, where he attended St Albans School, a local independent institution known for its emphasis on and . This suburban environment, designed as a model garden city, provided a stable, backdrop to his childhood amid the . Goody had at least one sibling, a younger brother, Richard Mead Goody (born 1921), who pursued a distinguished career as an atmospheric and at institutions including Caltech and Harvard. No other siblings are prominently documented in biographical accounts of the family.

Education

Goody attended St Albans School in , where he received his . In 1937, he enrolled at , to read English literature, but his undergraduate studies were interrupted in 1939 by the outbreak of the Second World War, during which he served in the military and was taken prisoner. He returned to in 1946 to complete his degree. Following his BA, Goody obtained a in at while working as an extramural tutor for the university's program in . He then transferred to , for graduate research in under , earning a B.Litt. in 1952 based on fieldwork among the LoDagaa people of northern .

Military Service

Goody enlisted in the British Army in October 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, and underwent officer training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Sherwood Foresters (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment) on 23 March 1940. Deployed to North Africa, he participated in combat against German forces commanded by Erwin Rommel as part of the Allied campaign. Captured by Axis forces during the Siege of on 21 June 1942, Goody spent the remainder of the war as a , totaling approximately two and a half years in captivity across multiple camps. He attempted escape on two occasions, both times being recaptured—the second in —before being transferred to a POW camp in , , where he remained for over a year. These experiences in ignited his scholarly interest in the continent, shaping his subsequent focus on African societies in . Goody was demobilized after six years of service in 1945.

Professional Career

Fieldwork in Africa

Goody's anthropological fieldwork in commenced in 1949 among the LoDagaa (also known as LoDagaba), a hoe-cultivating ethnic group in northern Ghana's Lawra District, now part of the . The LoDagaa lacked an indigenous chieftainship system, relying instead on ritual and religious structures for social organization, which Goody examined through extended immersion in their communities. This research, conducted during the final years of British colonial rule, emphasized relations, mortuary practices, and transmission, yielding foundational data for his 1962 Death, Property and the Ancestors, which analyzed how these elements perpetuated lineage continuity in acephalous societies. Funded by the , Goody's early expeditions positioned him in a quasi-administrative role, facilitating access to remote villages while embedding him in local agrarian life marked by subsistence farming and limited . He compared production and consumption patterns between LoDagaa communities and neighboring groups, highlighting contrasts in economic strategies and economies that informed his later comparative anthropology. In 1956, Goody shifted focus to the Gonja kingdom in northern , conducting a subsequent field stint that integrated ethnographic observation with historical reconstruction of their stratified, chiefly . This work explored Gonja's political centralization, migration histories, and interactions with LoDagaa groups, challenging diffusionist models by stressing endogenous developments in West African state formation. The Gonja research, building on his LoDagaa baseline, underscored Goody's method of juxtaposing acephalous and hierarchical systems to probe broader African social , with findings disseminated in studies like The Social Organisation of the LoWiili (1956) and subsequent Gonja-specific analyses.

Academic Positions and Institutions

Goody joined the in 1954 as an assistant lecturer in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, a position he held until 1959. He advanced to lecturer in the same department from 1959 to 1971, during which time he also served as Smuts Reader in Studies. In 1961, he was elected a of , where he remained affiliated throughout his career. From 1973 to 1984, Goody held the William Wyse Professorship of at , succeeding his mentor Meyer Fortes. He retired in 1984 but continued as Emeritus Professor of and Fellow of St John's College. Following retirement, he accepted visiting professorships at institutions worldwide, including extended periods at the and the , while maintaining his base.

Later Professional Activities

Following his retirement as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 1984, Goody served as Emeritus Professor, maintaining an affiliation with the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology and his fellowship at St John's College, where he continued to conduct research and host seminars from his college quarters. He undertook visiting professorships at various universities worldwide and delivered endowed lectures, sustaining his engagement with global academic networks. Goody's post-retirement scholarship emphasized comparative , particularly critiques of Eurocentric interpretations of social and across and beyond. Key publications included The Culture of Flowers (1993), examining cross-cultural symbolic uses of ; The East in the West (1996), positing a shared "Eurasian miracle" in institutional innovations rather than unique Western exceptionalism; The Theft of History (2006), which contested claims of European primacy in , , and by highlighting convergent Eurasian processes; and Metals, Culture and Capitalism (2012), analyzing metallurgy's role in economic divergence. He remained productively engaged into advanced age, finalizing manuscripts at age 92 in 2011 while working on multiple projects concurrently. Institutionally, Goody contributed to archival preservation by helping initiate a collection of approximately 250 sound and film recordings of prominent anthropologists in 1983, an effort continued by successors. He advised the in the years leading to the 1999 founding of the in Halle, , and delivered the institute's first keynote lecture in December 2001 on family organization, inheritance, and property rights in Eurasian transitions. In recognition of his enduring contributions, Goody was knighted in 2005.

Intellectual Contributions

Studies of African Societies

Goody's ethnographic studies of African societies centered on fieldwork in northern , where he examined the social structures, systems, and cultural practices of the LoDagaa (also referred to as LoWiili or Dagaba) and Gonja peoples. His research among the LoDagaa, conducted primarily in the late 1940s, portrayed them as an lacking centralized political authority, rigid ethnic boundaries, and pronounced divisions, emphasizing instead flexible networks and ritual-based . These observations formed the basis of his early monographs, including The Social Organisation of the LoWiili (1956), which detailed their systems, land rights, and earth priest rituals as mechanisms for maintaining order in a stateless context. A key focus of Goody's LoDagaa studies was mortuary practices and , explored in Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962), where he analyzed how rites and veneration regulated transmission and resolved disputes in lineages, challenging overly rigid interpretations of African descent groups by highlighting variability in practice. He documented the Bagre , an extended oral performed by societies, in The Myth of the Bagre (1972), using verbatim transcripts to illustrate how non-literate communities preserved historical and cosmological knowledge through mnemonic techniques and collective performance, with over 13,000 lines recorded across multiple versions. Shifting to the Gonja, a kingdom with stratified chiefly hierarchies dating to the 16th century, Goody conducted fieldwork in the 1950s and 1960s alongside his wife Esther Newcomb Goody, contrasting their centralized state formation with the LoDagaa's statelessness. His Gonja research, preserved in extensive field notes and maps delineating provinces and chiefly divisions, examined how conquest elites integrated with local populations, influencing social stratification and economic production. In Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (1971), Goody drew on these ethnographies to argue that African state development, as in Gonja, depended less on technological superiority than on military organization and tribute systems, using empirical comparisons to critique Eurocentric models of societal evolution. These studies provided foundational data for Goody's broader critiques of anthropological paradigms, such as segmentary opposition, by demonstrating through Gonja-LoDagaa contrasts how political centralization altered and without invoking universal stages of progress. His approach privileged detailed over , amassing genealogies, descriptions, and economic records that informed later works on literacy's absence in sustaining such oral traditions.

Theories of Literacy and Orality

Jack Goody developed his theories on and orality through comparative analysis of African oral traditions and Eurasian literate societies, drawing from his ethnographic fieldwork among the LoDagaa people in northern during the 1950s and 1960s. He posited that the introduction of writing systems fundamentally alters cognitive processes, , and historical consciousness, contrasting sharply with the constraints of purely oral cultures. In oral societies, transmission relies on mnemonic techniques and face-to-face , fostering a "homeostatic" view of the past filtered through present needs, which limits cumulative abstraction and critical scrutiny. In his seminal 1963 essay co-authored with , "The Consequences of Literacy," Goody argued that alphabetic writing enables the external storage of information, decoupling thought from immediate verbal performance and allowing for logical analysis, empirical verification, and the accumulation of knowledge over generations. This shift promotes abstract concepts, such as individualized property rights and contractual reasoning, which underpin modern economic and legal systems, as seen in the transition from Homeric to . , particularly in its fully phonetic form, facilitates a sense of distinct from , by preserving records amenable to revision and debate, unlike oral narratives prone to formulaic repetition and contextual adaptation. Goody expanded these ideas in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), critiquing structuralist dichotomies like Claude Lévi-Strauss's "savage" versus "domesticated" thought by attributing cognitive differences to literacy's technological effects rather than innate primitives. He emphasized how writing "domesticates" the mind by enabling systematic classification, decontextualized reasoning, and the separation of signifier from signified, transforming ritualistic oral practices into analyzable texts. For instance, lists and tables—hallmarks of literate enumeration—impose order on experience, fostering innovations in science and administration absent in oral regimes reliant on genealogical or totemic memory aids. Later works, such as The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (1987), nuanced the literacy hypothesis by exploring hybrid forms where oral and written modes coexist and mutually influence each other, as in scribal cultures of ancient or medieval . Goody distinguished restricted literacies (e.g., elite priestly scripts) from mass alphabetic diffusion, arguing the latter accelerates societal convergence toward by democratizing access to fixed texts. He supported these claims with cross-cultural evidence from and , cautioning against overdeterministic views while maintaining that literacy's affordances—permanence, portability, and combinability—drive causal changes in communication and power structures.

Kinship, Inheritance, and Reproduction

Goody's anthropological research on emphasized the interplay between practices, strategies, and reproductive norms, drawing from his fieldwork among the LoDagaa and Gonja peoples in northern during the 1950s. Among these groups, typically followed a lineal or converging devolution pattern, where property—primarily and —passed vertically to male heirs within the patriline, reinforcing corporate kin groups and . This system contrasted with Eurasian patterns and influenced reproductive behaviors, such as tolerance for to maximize male heirs and ensure lineage continuity amid high rates. In his comparative analyses, Goody highlighted diverging devolution as a hallmark of Eurasian systems, wherein property devolves laterally to both male and offspring, with daughters receiving portions via that paralleled sons' . This mechanism, prevalent in approximately 40% of Eurasian and Pacific societies based on data, facilitated the transfer of conjugal funds to both sexes and correlated with exogamous payments like rather than African-style bridewealth. Goody attributed these differences to modes of production: intensive plow in generated surpluses divisible among daughters without undermining household viability, whereas sub-Saharan Africa's hoe-based farming limited such fragmentation, favoring male-line concentration. Such strategies shaped reproductive outcomes, including delayed ages in diverging systems to accumulate dowries and higher rates of claims. Central to Goody's framework were "strategies of heirship," deliberate social mechanisms to secure heirs and perpetuate property transmission amid uncertainties like or early death. These included , , of infertile wives, and , which were more pronounced in patrilineal African contexts to prioritize male successors, as opposed to Eurasian emphases on bilateral transmission. In Comparative Studies in (1971), he applied these concepts to double descent systems and boundary maintenance, arguing that heirship tactics directly influenced boundaries and . Goody extended these ideas to European history in The Development of the Family and Marriage in (1983), positing that the emerged not as a modern industrial byproduct but from early medieval Church policies enforcing and prohibiting cousin marriages from the fourth century onward. These reforms promoted diverging by fragmenting extended kin networks, channeling property to nuclear units, and aligning with Christian doctrines on and indissolubility, which reduced and emphasized monogamous reproduction. Empirical evidence from Roman law's evolution into supported this, showing how systems ensured female economic agency while curbing kin-group consolidation. Later reflections, such as in essays revisiting and , underscored causal links between heirship strategies and demographic patterns, with Eurasian diverging fostering in formation compared to Africa's corporate lineages. Goody's evolutionist undertones, informed by the Ethnographic Atlas, posited these differences as adaptive responses to ecological and technological variables rather than cultural universals, though critics noted potential overemphasis on at the expense of ideological factors.

Comparative Analysis of Eurasian and Non-Eurasian Societies

Jack Goody's comparative framework emphasized the shared developmental trajectory of Eurasian societies—from to and the Islamic world—stemming from the urban revolution circa 3000 BCE, which fostered cities, states, , and technologies like the plow, , and writing systems. These elements enabled intensive , surplus production, and complex social organizations across the Eurasian landmass, contrasting sharply with non-Eurasian regions such as , where ecological constraints and hoe-based limited comparable advancements. Goody argued that Eurasia's convergence in these features undercut Eurocentric narratives of unique Western , positing instead a broader "Eurasian " driven by material conditions rather than cultural superiority. In production modes, Eurasian plow , often supplemented by and draft animals, allowed small family units to generate surpluses sufficient for markets, taxation, and urban elites, promoting and state bureaucracies. Non-Eurasian societies like those in relied on labor-intensive hoe farming in tropical environments with poor soils and low densities, yielding minimal surpluses and favoring extensive over intensification; this of labor, rather than land, shaped social priorities toward lineage expansion via and bridewealth exchanges. Goody drew on ethnographic data from his Gonja fieldwork in and cross-cultural datasets like Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas to illustrate how these production differences precluded large-scale class societies in , resulting in segmentary, decentralized polities controlled more by "means of destruction" (e.g., ) than production. Kinship and inheritance systems further highlighted these divides: Eurasian societies adopted "diverging devolution," transmitting property bilaterally (e.g., dowries to daughters alongside for sons), which reinforced nuclear families, women's limited property rights, and class to preserve elite status amid intensive . In contrast, African systems emphasized unilineal, homogeneous along one (often patrilineal), tied to corporate lineages that pooled resources for , reflecting exogamous rules and oral, non- traditions that hindered abstract property concepts. Goody linked these to broader causal chains, where Eurasia's facilitated legal codification of and state administration, absent in Africa's predominantly oral cultures, thus perpetuating structural inequalities without invoking racial or cultural .

Critiques of Historical and Sociological Paradigms

Goody's critiques targeted the Eurocentric biases embedded in dominant historical and sociological frameworks, which he argued systematically undervalued non-Western achievements to construct a of European exceptionalism. In The Theft of History (2006), he contended that Western scholars "stole" universal historical processes by retroactively attributing innovations such as the rise of , the , and modern periodization exclusively to , while portraying and other regions as stagnant or derivative. This involved imposing anachronistic categories like and the on Eurasian societies without comparative scrutiny, thereby denying parallels in , trade networks, and technological diffusion across the continent. Central to his analysis was a rejection of specific theoretical constructs, including Karl Marx's , which Goody viewed as a fabricated justification for Asian economic inertia that overlooked protocapitalist exchanges and community structures in regions like and . He similarly dismantled Max Weber's attribution of rational to Protestant , arguing it ignored merchant guilds and financial instruments in medieval Islam and Song , and critiqued Norbert Elias's "civilizing process" for confining manners and to a purportedly unique European trajectory, disregarding equivalent developments in Confucian bureaucracies. Goody extended these points to and , faulting their reliance on unilinear evolutionary models that privileged Western divergences over Eurasian convergences in , , and warfare. Advocating a rigorous , Goody emphasized treating Eurasian societies as variants within shared ecological and institutional contexts rather than isolated exceptions, thereby exposing how paradigms like perpetuated myths of Eastern timelessness. In Renaissances: The One or the Many? (2010), he applied this lens to challenge the singularity of the , documenting analogous cultural revivals in twelfth-century and Tang-Song , complete with artistic , textual recovery, and urban efflorescence, which undercut claims of Western teleological superiority. These critiques, grounded in Goody's anthropological fieldwork and archival synthesis, urged historians to prioritize empirical parallels over ideologically laden periodizations.

Reception, Criticisms, and Legacy

Honours and Academic Recognition

Goody was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1976. In 1980, he became a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He received the Huxley Memorial Medal, the Royal Anthropological Institute's highest honour, in 1995. In 1991, Goody was admitted as a Member of the . He was elected a Member of the in 2004. The following year, in the 2005 , he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to . In 2006, he was appointed Commandeur in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. Goody also received honorary degrees from several universities, including the , the , the University of Paul Verlaine-Metz, Paris Nanterre (Paris X), and the .

Key Debates and Criticisms

Goody's theories on the transformative effects of , particularly in The Domestication of the Savage Mind () and The Interface Between the Written and the Oral (1987), faced significant scrutiny for positing overly deterministic cognitive and social shifts from writing systems. Critics, including Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole in their 1981 ethnographic study of the of , argued that literacy's impacts are highly contextual and script-specific rather than universally autonomous, challenging Goody's claims of inherent analytical decontextualization and logical restructuring in literate societies. Similarly, scholars like Ruth Finnegan contended that Goody undervalued the sophistication of oral traditions, such as mnemonic devices and formulaic compositions in Homeric epics, which enable complex reasoning without writing, thus questioning the between orality and as a primary causal driver of historical divergence. In and studies, particularly The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (1983), Goody's hypothesis that the medieval strategically promoted structures and systems to weaken extended kin networks and consolidate control drew debate over empirical fit and causal attribution. Historians like Jack Goody's interlocutors in Family and (1976) critiqued his reliance on normative ideals of versus actors' actual practices, noting variability in European movable transmission that did not uniformly align with anti-clannish reforms. Anthropologists such as Maurice Godelier argued that Goody's materialist emphasis on and overlooked how evolves through broader social relations independent of economic incentives, reducing complex affinal strategies to functionalist explanations. Goody's comparative Eurasian frameworks in works like The Theft of History (2006) elicited criticisms for broad-brush generalizations that, while anti-Eurocentric, sometimes imposed uniform causal mechanisms across diverse polities. Area specialists, including those reviewing his critiques of , faulted Goody for insufficient engagement with China-specific evidence, such as persistent structures under imperial , which complicated his narrative of convergent "" modes over unique feudal transitions. Additionally, his resolute in linking production strategies to social forms was seen by some, like Chris Hann, as sidelining ideational or contingent factors in historical divergence, leading to debates on whether such approaches risk ahistorical universalism despite Goody's intent to decenter . Despite these points of contention, Goody's insistence on cross-cultural comparison was widely credited with provoking reevaluations of parochial historiographies, though detractors noted his later syntheses occasionally prioritized over granular data. Goody's advocacy for comparative methods across , , and challenged the discipline's traditional focus on discrete "other cultures," promoting instead a postcolonial, global that integrated ethnographic detail with broad historical analysis. His work emphasized freeing historical inquiry from Eurocentric assumptions, influencing scholars to adopt cross-continental comparisons of social institutions like and . This approach, rooted in his African fieldwork among the LoDagaa in the , expanded to Eurasian studies, where he demonstrated continuities in production and reproduction systems that undermined claims of Western uniqueness. In literacy studies, Goody's theories profoundly shaped anthropological views on cognition and social organization by distinguishing oral traditions' reliance on situational memory from writing's capacity for abstract scrutiny and institutional permanence. Works such as Literacy in Traditional Societies (1968) and The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977) argued that literacy enables bureaucratic control, rational critique, and cumulative knowledge accumulation, effects absent in purely oral societies where kinship and authority remain face-to-face and fluid. These ideas influenced cognitive anthropology and extended to education and communication studies, countering overly deterministic views while highlighting technology's causal role in intellectual shifts. Goody's analyses, spanning 10 major books including Production and Reproduction (1976) and The Development of the Family and in (1983), reframed debates by comparing strategies across , , and , revealing how property transmission shapes roles and rather than innate cultural essences. This comparative lens critiqued structuralist paradigms like those of Lévi-Strauss, prioritizing empirical variation in Eurasian family forms over universal models, and impacted sociological inquiries into and reproduction. His holistic integration of fields inspired institutional legacies, such as advising the Institute for (established 1999) and the series of Goody Lectures (2011–2022), which fostered interdisciplinary dialogues on and beyond. By modeling as a tool for testing theories against diverse evidence, Goody's output—46 books and over 370 articles—encouraged a generation to prioritize causal explanations of technological and institutional divergences over ideological narratives.

Major Works

Principal Books

Goody's principal books encompass ethnographic studies of African societies, analyses of and systems, theories of literacy's societal impacts, and comparative examinations of Eurasian and non-Eurasian cultural developments. These works, often published by , draw on his fieldwork among the LoDagaa and Bagre peoples in while integrating broader historical and anthropological frameworks. Key early monographs include The Social Organisation of the LoWiili (1956), detailing the and among the LoWiili of northern and Haute Volta. Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962) analyzes LoDagaa mortuary rituals, practices, and their role in maintaining social continuity through ancestor veneration. In kinship and reproduction, Comparative Studies in Kinship (1969) compares descent and systems across societies, challenging universal models. Bridewealth and Dowry (1973), co-authored with S.J. Tambiah, contrasts marriage payment forms in , , and , linking them to strategies and roles. Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (1976) explores how household economies and demographic patterns shape structures differently in agrarian versus industrial contexts. On literacy and orality, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977) argues that writing technologies transform , categorization, and beyond mere preservation of . The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (1986) extends this by examining how alphabetic scripts enable abstract reasoning, , and historical consciousness in literate societies. Later comparative works critique Eurocentric : Cooking, Cuisine and Class (1982) uses culinary practices to compare class formation and cultural divergence between and . The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive (1990) reassesses pre-industrial marriage and systems across , emphasizing continuities over binaries. The Theft of History (2006) contends that Western narratives appropriate non-European innovations in statecraft, economy, and culture, distorting global historical causality.

Selected Articles and Essays

Goody co-authored the seminal essay "The Consequences of Literacy" with in 1963, published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, which argued that the introduction of alphabetic writing systems facilitated abstract thought, cumulative historical records, and social differentiation beyond what oral traditions could sustain, drawing contrasts between literate Greek society and preliterate ones. In studies, his 1956 article "A Comparative Approach to and " in the British Journal of examined variations in prohibitions, positing that such rules functioned to regulate transmission and formation rather than universal psychological taboos. The 1959 essay "The Mother’s Brother and the Sister’s Son in ," appearing in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, analyzed avunculocal patterns among the LoDagaba, linking maternal uncle roles to matrilineal resource control in agrarian economies. Goody's 1969 piece "Inheritance, Property, and Marriage in Africa and Eurasia" in Sociology highlighted divergent strategies—such as divergent devolution in Eurasia favoring nuclear families versus convergent modes in Africa emphasizing corporate kin groups—challenging assumptions of uniform kinship evolution. Later, in 1996, "Comparing Family Systems in Europe and Asia: Are There Different Sets of Rules?" in Population and Development Review critiqued oversimplified East-West dichotomies, using demographic data to argue for shared Eurasian patterns in marriage age and heirship diverging from sub-Saharan norms. On literacy's cognitive effects, the 1977 essay "Literacy and Classification: On Turning the Tables," included in Text and Context, contended that writing enabled taxonomic hierarchies and reversible propositions absent in oral mnemonics, evidenced by ethnographic observations of LoDagaba practices. His 2006 essay "The Theft of History," excerpted in the book of the same name, accused Western historiography of appropriating non-European innovations like and while attributing divergence to innate superiority, supported by archival comparisons of Chinese and European merchant guilds. Finally, the 2015 article "Asia and " in History and Anthropology synthesized Goody's comparative framework, using trade records from 1000–1800 CE to refute claims of unique European individualism, attributing global shifts to technological convergences in and .

References

  1. https://therai.org.uk/archives-and-manuscripts/obituaries/jack-goody/
  2. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/06/jack-goody
  3. https://www.eth.mpg.de/4046084/Goody_AA_obituary_March2016.pdf
  4. https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb275-goody
  5. https://www.eth.mpg.de/3790187/Goody_Lecture_2011.pdf
  6. https://www.berose.fr/article3854.html
  7. https://booksandideas.net/The-Need-to-Compare
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  9. https://www.eth.mpg.de/4623676/Memoir_John-Rankine-Goody.pdf
  10. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/11771033/Sir-Jack-Goody-social-anthropologist-obituary.html
  11. https://gs.uwpress.org/content/21/1/3
  12. https://web.gps.caltech.edu/~yly/yly_mac/ReprintsYLY/N439_yung_2023_goody.pdf
  13. https://www.scotsman.com/news/obituaries/obituary-sir-jack-goody-kt-anthropologist-1497660
  14. https://www.eth.mpg.de/4046335/Goody_obituary_KHart.pdf
  15. https://savageminds.org/2015/09/15/jack-goody-1919-2015-an-oral-history/
  16. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003262374-3/jack-goody-alan-macfarlane-eric-hobsbawm-radha-b%25C3%25A9teille
  17. https://www.berose.fr/article2456.html
  18. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23820338
  19. https://www.eth.mpg.de/5317388/Goody_Lecture_2019.pdf
  20. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329524167_Jack_Goody_Early_Fieldwork_and_the_Passing_of_an_Era_of_Cambridge_Anthropology_in_Northern_Ghana
  21. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/pioneering-social-research/old-boundaries-new-thoughts/64E68DBBB675CD2EE8DECDFB2EDB80A2
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