Expanding Interests: Jack Goody’s Scholarship from Ethnography and Social Anthropology to Comparative Sociology and World History

Literary studies, war experience, anthropology

A pupil at St Albans School from 1930, Jack Goody matriculated at St John’s College in Cambridge to read English literature in 1938. Influenced by literary theory and the New Criticism developed by F. R. Leavis, he befriended students such as Ian Watt and Eric Hobsbawm, both members of the socialist club and aficionados of jazz music. Enlisting in the British Army in October 1939, Goody underwent officer training at Sandhurst and was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Sherwood Foresters in March 1940. During the Second World War he was stationed at Nicosia (Cyprus) with brief sojourns in Port Said (Egypt) and the Western Desert of Libya. Captured by Rommel’s German forces during the Siege of Tobruk in June 1942, he was transported to southern Italy, before being sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Chieti, central Italy. After escaping with three companions from a train during transportation to northern Italy in September 1943, he was hidden by illiterate shepherds in the Abruzzo Mountains, east of Rome, for six months. This encounter sparked his interest in the difference between oral and literate communication. In a way, it was the birth of his vocation as a social anthropologist. Captured by the SS in Rome, Goody was interned in a POW camp near Moosburg, Bavaria, in April 1944. He was soon moved to an officers’ camp in Eichstätt, which housed a library where Goody read the abridged edition of Frazer’s The Golden Bough and the historian E. K. Chambers’s The Mediaeval Stage (Goody 1992, 2012b). He also read V. Gordon Childe’s What Happened in History (1942), ‘a book that has always remained at the forefront of my thinking’ (Goody 2006b : 503). Liberated by the US 14th Armored Division on 29 April 1945, Goody returned to England in May 1945 – after a military interlude lasting almost six years.

Back in Cambridge, he completed his degree in English literature by passing Part I of the tripos in June 1946. He then switched to the Faculty of Archaeology and Anthropology, acquiring a Diploma in Anthropology in June 1947. The course dated back to 1908 and resembled the one initiated by Edward B. Tylor in Oxford in 1902. At that time, anthropology was what Meyer Fortes (1953 : 5) called ‘an omnibus subject’ : the syllabus included ‘prehistoric and historic anthropology’ as well as ‘ethnology (including sociology and comparative religion), physical anthropology and psychological anthropology’ (Haddon 1908). The program Goody followed would have been similar to what Alfred Radcliffe-Brown had studied in 1904 : prehistoric archaeology, ethnology, physical and psychological anthropology. Had there been a Diploma in Sociology, Goody would have opted for that. Weekly lectures were delivered by Edward Evans-Pritchard, who came over from Oxford to expound on the feud in Sudan and Libya (Goody 1991 : 4 ; 1995 : 122).

Goody entered the field at a dynamic moment. Bronislaw Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown had laid the groundwork for British social anthropology during the 1920s and 1930s, and a period of rapid expansion followed the Second World War (Goody 1995 ; Shankland 2019). The Association of Social Anthropologists (ASA) was established at Oxford in 1946 with Evans-Pritchard as its first secretary and Radcliffe-Brown as its president. In that same year, Evans-Pritchard succeeded Radcliffe-Brown as Professor of Social Anthropology at Oxford. Radcliffe-Brown’s comparative study of kinship and descent in Australia was an important influence on Goody’s early work, especially in connection with reading the work of Émile Durkheim and L’Année sociologique (Goody 1984, 1995 ; from here on, all references without author names refer to books or articles by Goody).

Goody established valuable contacts with archaeologists such as Dorothy Garrod, Graham Clarke and Glyn Daniel, and passed this holistic course ‘with Distinction.’ He was supervised by the prehistorian Daniel (2006b : 503). In March 1947, Goody married Mary Joan Wright, a teacher of English, and began work as an Assistant Education Officer for the Hertfordshire County Council. He left this post in 1949 to register as a research student in Oxford, having become ‘interested in the comparative study of human society’ (1995 : 120). At Oxford, he was ‘attracted, like many of my contemporaries at Cambridge, by the teaching of Evans-Pritchard. I wanted to work in West Africa so it was Fortes who interviewed me’ (1983c : 2). ‘I ... was asked to talk to Meyer Fortes, the West Africanist’ (1991 : 4). Fortes was Reader in Sociology at Oxford in the years 1946-50 before being appointed William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology in Cambridge in 1951 ; he remained Head of Department until his retirement in 1973, when his outstanding pupil, Jack Goody, succeeded him. Goody was awarded with a scholarship from the Colonial Social Science Research Council and spent the year 1949–50 in Oxford as a member of Balliol College, studying in the Faculty of Geography and Anthropology under Evans-Pritchard and Fortes.

Goody later reminisced that his decision to go to the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) for field research under the supervision of Fortes included a personal element : a friend at Cambridge called Joe Reindorf had begun a PhD in history and then returned to Ghana to work for a relative’s firm (1995 : 121). He also remarked that he did not want to ‘work too far from Europe’ as he had a family and ‘distance mattered.’ Carrying out ethnographic fieldwork on kinship and inheritance as a Sociological Research Officer, Goody was employed by the Gold Coast Government from September 1950 until September 1951. He worked among two neighboring Mooré-speaking groups in what is now the border area of northwest Ghana, southern Upper Volta and northeast Ivory Coast. From October 1951 on, he wrote up his data and in March 1952 was awarded a B.Litt. in Social Anthropology in Oxford for a thesis titled ‘The Social Organization of the Lo Wiili.’ This monograph was published under a slightly different title in London in 1956 (second edition 1967). Prior to this, Goody saw to it that his mimeographed book, The Ethnography of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast, was printed in London at the Colonial Office (1954).

Ethnography, anthropology and history of Africa

After finishing his B.Litt. thesis, Goody left that same month for a second period of fieldwork, again in the Northern Territories, which lasted from April to December 1952. Having spent his first ‘tour’ in a community he called the LoWiili, he now lived among the LoDagaba (1962 : vi) ; collectively, he referred to these communities as LoDagaa (ibid. 4).

He submitted his PhD thesis to the University of Cambridge in June 1954, a massive manuscript on ‘the ritual institutions of the LoWiili and the LoDagaba’ (iii + 410 pp.). Its subtitle reveals the interest he developed in the field : ‘with special reference to death, inheritance and the ancestors.’ His fieldwork in two nearby communities added up to one and one half years and included ‘some hundred days attending funeral ceremonies [and] about twenty-five burial services.’ A decidedly ethnographic study, including rich detail on ancestor worship and descent groups, property relations and ritual institutions, Goody’s dissertation was explicitly presented as a contribution to ‘comparative sociology’ (1962 : vi-vii). It was influenced not only by Durkheim’s blend of sociology and ethnology, and Radcliffe-Brown’s comparative sociology (Radcliffe-Brown 1952 : 189), but also by Talcott Parsons. Parsons was the author of The Structure of Social Action (1937) and The Social System (1951), who had set up the interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations at Harvard in 1946 and had lectured in Cambridge during Goody’s formative years [4]. The dissertation led to Goody’s early masterpiece, Death, Property and the Ancestors : A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa (1962).

After defending his PhD thesis (with Max Gluckman as external examiner and G. I. Jones as internal examiner), Goody was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in October 1954. In a 1972 CV, he wrote : ‘During my tenure of this post I spent four vacations and one sabbatical term doing fieldwork among the Gonja of Northern Ghana, under grants from the Social Science Research Council and the Nuffield Foundation [5].’ This third stint of fieldwork focused on the Gonja Kingdom and was carried out in cooperation with Esther Newcomb, Jack’s first graduate student. They married in the Gold Coast in September 1956. Esther’s research was sponsored by the Ford Foundation. She completed her PhD in 1961 and became a member of the same department [6]. They published six articles together. Goody supervised students at St John’s College from 1958, was promoted to University Lecturer (with tenure) in 1959 and elected a Fellow of St John’s in 1961.

The political context of Goody’s work in the Gold Coast had significant consequences for the direction of his research. As Keith Hart has noted, ‘Goody embraced the anti-colonial revolution after the war and Ghana was its epicentre in Africa. He joined Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party during his first period of fieldwork and soon realised that an independent West Africa would need histories of the pre-colonial past in order to chart a post-colonial future. Goody then switched to the pre-colonial history of West African kingdoms. In the process, he led the move from ethnography to history that marked African anthropology then and African studies in general today’ (Hart 2016 : 27). ‘Ghana is in many ways a paradigmatic African state,’ wrote Goody. ‘It was the first to undergo the process of decolonisation with the elections of 1951 and with independence in 1957. It was one of the earliest and best organised of the new nations of Africa’ (2007 : 1). In 1960, the Year of Africa, Nkrumah proclaimed Ghana to be a republic, of which he assumed the presidency. Goody concluded that this ‘new Africa was ... demanding a history.’ ‘Earlier anthropologists had often steered away from historical considerations’ – ‘partly because of the often rash speculations of their predecessors about the past, partly because of an alternative methodological approach associated with fieldwork, and partly for the practical reason that archives and records were officially closed’ (1991 : 3).

Between March and October 1964, Goody was a visiting professor at the Institute of African Studies in Legon and the Department of Sociology of the University of Ghana. Four months were spent in Gonja. In 1964–66, Jack and Esther supervised ten PhD students, including Keith Hart [7]. In 1965–66 Goody was again a visiting professor at this institute, supervising T. M. Mustapha and C. Y. Boateng on behalf of the Ashanti Research Project at the University of Ghana [8]. During this period he also worked in the Ghana National Archives. A critical appraisal of Goody’s ‘ethnography of the LoDagaa (Ghana)’ is given by Carola Lentz (2019) ; see also Isidore Lobnibe on Goody’s fieldwork in Ghana Studies (2018). In October 1966 Goody succeeded Audrey Richards as Director of the African Studies Centre at Cambridge, a position he held until his election to replace Meyer Fortes in 1973.

Goody’s major works from this African period can be summarized as follows :

Table 1. Ethnography, anthropology and history of Africa (18 books)

• The Ethnography of the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast (London 1954)
• The Social Organisation of the LoWiili (London 1956)
• Death, Property and the Ancestors : A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa (Stanford and London 1962)
• (eds) Jack Goody, and Kwame Arhin, Ashanti and the Northwest (Legon 1965)
• (ed.) Succession to High Office (Cambridge 1966)
• Joseph Adam Braimah, and Jack Goody, Salaga : The Struggle for Power (London 1967)
• Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (Oxford 1971)
• The Myth of the Bagre (Oxford 1972)
• (ed.) Changing Social Structure in Ghana (London 1975)
• Jack Goody, and Nelson O. Addo, Siblings in Ghana (Legon 1975)
• Jack Goody, and S. W. D. K. Gandah (eds) Une Récitation du Bagré (Paris 1980)
• Jack Goody, and S. W. D. K. Gandah, The Third Bagre : A Myth Revisited (Durham, NC 2002)
• Ghana Observed, Africa Reconsidered (Legon 2007)
• |Including five books written by other authors and edited or co-edited by Goody :
• (ed.) David Tait, The Konkomba of Northern Ghana (Oxford 1961)
• (ed.) J. C. Dougah, Wa and its People (Legon 1966)
• (ed.) Meyer Fortes, Religion, Morality and the Person : Essays on Tallensi Religion (Cambridge 1987)
• (eds) Emrys L. Peters, The Bedouin of Cyrenaica (ed. with Emanuel Marx, Cambridge 1990)
• (ed.) Sunkuol Wura Der Kumboono Gandah, The Silent Rebel (Nairobi 2004)

A milestone in this series was The Myth of the Bagre, a study of the myth and rituals of the Bagré ‘secret’ association. Goody wrote down a first version from a recitation spread over ten days. He recorded four renditions of the Black Bagre and ten of the White Bagre with his friend Sunkuol Wura Der Kumboono Gandah in 1969–70. The English publication (1972a) was followed by a version in French (1980) and an extended ‘third’ version with Gandah (2002). More than anything else Goody published, this work reveals that he was not just another ‘colonial ethnographer’ but an anthropologist and historian deeply concerned with local myth-making and oral performances encountered in initiation rituals among groups of the Akan hinterland. The fifteen years during which he worked in and on Ghana, and Africa more generally, also included the early results of his comparative research on marriage and the family.

Kinship, marriage and the domestic domain

The study of kinship and descent, marriage and the family, was central to the work of Meyer Fortes and remained so for Jack Goody. The latter adopted the term ‘domestic group’ as the basic unit of society in order to help resolve ambiguities concerning the terms family and household (Goody 1958, 1972b). He took up Fortes’s concept of a domestic cycle and heeded his call to examine the domestic domain as a dynamic process (Fortes 1936). Goody continued to publish in this field long after he had turned to other themes.

Table 2. Kinship, marriage and the domestic domain (10 books)

• (ed.) The Developmental Cycle in Domestic Groups (Cambridge 1958)
• Comparative Studies in Kinship (London 1969)
• (ed.) Kinship : Selected Readings (Harmondsworth 1971)
• Jack Goody, and Stanley J. Tambiah, Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge 1973)
• (ed.) The Character of Kinship (Cambridge 1973)
• (eds) Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk, and Edward P. Thompson, Family and Inheritance : Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200-1800 (Cambridge 1976)
• Production and Reproduction : A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (Cambridge 1976)
• The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge 1983)
• The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive : Systems of Marriage and the Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia (Cambridge 1990)
• The European Family : An Historico-Anthropological Essay (Oxford/Malden, MA 2000)

Noteworthy in all these works is the comparative approach and the gradual widening of perspective to focus on the family in Europe and Asia.

Goody’s call for a comparative sociology (see Goody 1962, 1969a, 1982) was innovative in the context of social anthropology’s rise as an academic discipline in the English-speaking world. After the establishment of the ASA in 1946, chairs in social anthropology were created in London, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Edinburgh and elsewhere, which evolved into departments (Kuper 1973 ; Goody 1995 ; Mills 2008). As Goody put it : ‘It was truly an expansive moment … students of Malinowski (and to a lesser extent Radcliffe-Brown) … presented fieldwork in a theoretical frame, trained students in this framework and assisted them in turn to undertake fieldwork and eventually to get teaching positions’ (1995 : 117). When Goody studied at Oxford under Evans-Pritchard and Fortes in 1949–50, ethnography (‘intensive fieldwork’) was a major part of the curriculum. During his own fieldwork, Goody had focused on kinship, marriage, inheritance and religion, vital subjects of anthropological inquiry. He largely followed Fortes, who had published The Web of Kinship among the Tallensi (1949), a classic study of a patrilineal society only one hundred miles eastwards of the LoDagaa. Goody acknowledged his merits by editing The Character of Kinship as a Festschrift for Fortes on the occasion of his retirement (1973) as well as a ‘Memorial Issue’ (1983b) and a posthumous volume of Fortes’s essays on Tallensi Religion (1987).

More than anyone else in his generation, Goody added comparative research to the agenda of British social anthropologists. Founding fathers such as Tylor, Bastian and Frazer had established the comparative method in late nineteenth-century anthropology. George Peter Murdock proposed it as a baseline for cultural anthropology in the United States and created the Human Relations Area Files at Yale University in 1949. In Britain, few professional anthropologists pursued comparison in the middle of the twentieth century. In contrast, Goody’s study of mortuary rituals and property transmission in two LoDagaa communities was comparative. The published version of his thesis addressed ‘social anthropologists working in an unfamiliar society’ (1962 : 1) but stated ambitiously in the first sentence : ‘Field work apart, the development of a sociology that is not simply limited to Western Europe requires three things : first, hypotheses, second, the com-parative analysis to test them, and, third, the conceptual tools to build them.’ Yet, while Goody asserted the need for comparative analysis, he admitted that he had no experience with in-the-field comparative research : ‘the only instrument I know of that might have helped,’ namely, the Human Relations Area Files, ‘was not available to me during my research’ (1962 : v–vi).

Goody started with a conventional project in ethnography, critically discussing articles on ethnohistory (1959a) and ethnology (1960), but his fieldwork was explicitly comparative. He applied the comparative analysis prominently in his articles on ‘Incest and Adultery’ (1956b), ‘The Mother’s Brother and the Sister’s Son in West Africa’ (1959b) and ‘The Classification of Double Descent Systems’ (1961). The latter publication presented the LoWiili (the ‘true Lobi’) as a society with a double descent system. Yet Goody’s real originality in these kinship studies lay in proposing to include ‘property relations.’ In a diagram in Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962 : 9) he worked out a system of ‘double clanship and double inheritance among the LoDagaa’ in which both the LoWiili and the LoDagaba had matriclans and patriclans – the difference being that among the LoWiili all property was inherited patrilineally whereas among the LoDagaba only immovable property was inherited patrilineally and movable property was inherited matrilineally.

Goody returned to the concept of comparative sociology on numerous occasions : in an article on ‘The Prospects for Social Anthropology’ (1966b), in the first chapter of his collection of essays Comparative Studies in Kinship (1969b), in the subtitle of his edited volume Changing Social Structure in Ghana (1975) and in his major contribution to food studies, Cooking, Cuisine and Class : A Study in Comparative Sociology (1982). Without emphasizing the concept as such, he compared complex political systems in Succession to High Office (1966a) and Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (1971). In Comparative Studies in Kinship, Goody formulated his intentions very clearly : ‘We must create the conditions for the emergence of a truly comparative sociology’ (1969a : xiv).

In 1967 he was awarded a two-year grant from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) for ‘the comparative study of African institutions employing modern techniques of data processing.’ This project was implemented in 1968-1972 as the SSRC Research Project on a ‘Comparative Study of Institutions, with special reference to Africa’ (Goody, CV of May 1972). As director of the African Studies Centre, Goody hired research assistants, among them Joan Buckley, Barrie Irving and Nicky Tahany [9]. His collection of Comparative Studies in Kinship (1969) included a chapter on ‘Comparative Sociology and the Decolonization of the Social Sciences.’ In 1968, Goody applied for the degree of ScD (Scientiae Doctor), which was awarded in November 1969 [10]. A grant provided by the Ford-Rockefeller Foundation for a comparative investigation of population and inheritance was acquired in 1971–72. By this time, he had persuaded the Cambridge department to subscribe to the Human Relations Area Files.

The fullest account of Goody’s contributions to the comparative method is Production and Reproduction : A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain (1976). In it he posed the following questions :

How did the states and local communities in Ghana resemble and differ from those of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East with which they were so often compared and contrasted ? … What made people think the adjectives ‘tribal,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘savage’ appropriate to one set of cultures and not to the other ? Were there no better ways of assessing similarity and difference than by means of a pair of crude binary oppositions ? (1976 : ix).

With a comparative historical theory and twenty-six statistical tables deriving from Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas (1967), Goody postulated the development of domestic institutions, the family, marriage and conjugal roles in relation to shifts in the mode of productive activity, notably the change from hoe to plough agriculture. He argued that ‘the differences between the centralised societies of Africa and Eurasia are highlighted in the household economy. While Eurasia had a haute cuisine as well as a lower, basse cuisine, Africa had neither ; its cooking was demotic’ (1976 : 104). Discussing the reasons why Europe and Asia favour marriage within the social group, whereas in Africa the tendency was to exogamous marriage, he noted similar differences with reference to other criteria, including the division of labor by sex. Behind all these lie discrepancies in the systems of agriculture and the social hierarchies they support. Goody concluded that ‘the central differences of production and reproduction in Africa on the one hand and Europe and Asia on the other ... have to be interpreted not only in specific cultural terms but also in the wider context of the broad historical changes in man’s social life’ (1976 : 120). According to Hart (2006 : 29), this book ‘launched the series of large-scale comparative investigations for which [Goody] is now best known.’

In 1973, Goody succeeded Meyer Fortes as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, a chair he held until his retirement in 1984. He was a vigorous Head of Department throughout this period. Edmund Leach, lecturer since 1953, had received a personal chair in 1972, but as Provost of King’s College he had to spend much time and energy on college matters. Goody had more time to pursue the goals announced in his 1972 application, in which he remarked regarding ‘future policy’ :

Clearly I would want to continue the work in which the Department has been successfully engaged over many years. Any changes would come about as the result of discussion among the staff and students. But I would myself press for an extension of the frontiers of the subject [anthropology] into comparative analysis, and into linguistic and literary work. I would also wish to build up the Laboratory of Social Anthropology, which I have helped to institute, and to encourage intellectual links with other fields of study, as I have tried to do in the context of regional studies. Although I have always been interested in history, I am concerned that Social Anthropology should not become an historical subject, purely concerned with vanishing or vanished societies [11].

As professor, Goody’s work came to have an ever-greater concentration on the family in Europe and Asia, without giving up Africa. The intended title for his volume Changing Social Structure in Ghana included both Africa and Eurasia (CV 1972). His Comparative Studies in Kinship (1969) included a chapter on Indo-European kinship. His Cambridge Papers volume co-written with his colleague Stanley Tambiah, Bridewealth and Dowry (1973), deepened comparisons between societies of Africa and Eurasia. His venture into European history (The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, 1983a) ‘outraged Cambridge historians for invading the historians’ territory even more than Alan Macfarlane’s [1978] study of English individualism [had done] : they were stealing history !’ (Hann 2009 : 128).

The culmination of Goody’s widening interest was his monograph, The Oriental, the Ancient and the Primitive : Systems of Marriage and the Family in the Pre-Industrial Societies of Eurasia (1990). Detailed chapters discussing material from China, India and the Near East as well as ‘Greece and Rome, yesterday and today’ manifest a solid comparative approach, stemming ‘from an attempt to understand why the particular groups I first studied in Africa differ in certain definite ways from pre-industrial Europe’ (1990 : xi). ‘My thrust has been to look at the entire domestic domain, especially in relation to the domestic economy, and to argue that neither Oriental nor Ancient systems were “primitive” in this sense but resembled the pre-industrial societies of Europe in significant respects’ (1995 : 133, italics added).

Orality, literacy and the written tradition

Goody’s research on the Bagre myth helped him to deepen his interest in modes of oral and literate communication. As a student, he had worked on literary theory and the New Criticism. His stay in the Abruzzo Mountains had inspired reflection on communication among illiterate people. His vocation as an anthropologist had resulted from being deprived of books and from contact with the illiterate Abruzzian shepherds who had hidden him (1985 : 5). This interest grew during fieldwork in Ghana by observing differences between oral communication and religions of the book (e.g. Islam, Christianity) across West Africa.

In 1959–60, Goody enjoyed a ‘stimulating year’ at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (Palo Alto, California). This sojourn resulted in a joint article written with his college friend Ian Watt on ‘The Consequences of Literacy’ (Goody and Watt 1963). Scholars working in ‘advanced’ societies had taken the existence of writing for granted and social anthropologists tended to focus on ‘preliterate’ societies (Goody 1968 : 1). However, the dichotomy between ‘the “mythical” thought of primitives and the “logico-empirical” thought of civilized man’ was ‘untenable,’ as was Lévy-Bruhl’s (1910, 1922) distinction between ‘prelogical’ and ‘logical’ mentalities (Goody and Watt 1968 [1963] : 43). Arguing that literacy allowed for the objective recording of historical facts, ‘there arose an attitude to the past very different from that common in non-literate societies’ (ibid. 48). This had resulted in the creation of what Goody called ‘a politically literate community’ across Europe and Asia.

This article stimulated waves of comparative research into written and oral communication. In Goody’s edited volume Literacy in Traditional Societies, scholars explored ‘the “ethnography” of literacy in “traditional” or pre-industrial societies’ (1968 : 4). It included chapters on literacy in ‘traditional’ China and India, a Buddhist village from North-East Thailand, in Kerala (India), the Western Sudan, ‘a nomadic society’ (Somalia), Madagascar, New Guinea and Melanesia, and in pre-industrial England. In the introduction to this volume, Goody refers to literacy as ‘the technology of the intellect’ (1968 : 1).

Continuing this line of inquiry in The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), Goody sought to analyze ‘the effects of writing on “modes of thought” (or cognitive processes) on the one hand, and on the major institutions of society on the other’ (1977 : ix). Again taking issue with the ‘we/they division, which is both binary and ethnocentric,’ he criticized Claude Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind (1966, French edition 1962) for replacing earlier dichotomies between ‘primitive’ and ‘advanced’ societies with another binary view that contrasted ‘wild’ (sauvage) and ‘domesticated’ (domestiquée) thought (1977 : 7). This critique was against the grain, and disregarded the merits of Lévi-Strauss’s productive use of binary structures to analyze a vast corpus of myths (1964–1971). Structuralism, as presented by Lévi-Strauss, provided an important alternative to the structural-functionalism dominating British social anthropology during the 1960s. Other leading anthropologists, such as Edmund Leach, were sympathetic to the new impulse. Leach taught a course on Culture and Communication (lectures later published, Leach 1976a) and wrote, in a critical review of Radcliffe-Brown’s achievements, ‘in Cambridge under the guidance of Professor Fortes and Professor Goody, the tradition of British empiricism has been most staunchly upheld’ (Leach 1976b : 173). Goody responded to this critique in The Expansive Moment, arguing that anthropology needs ‘fieldwork, ethnography and “empiricism”’ and ‘the comparative dimension’ (1995 : 155–56).

Tensions within the Cambridge department were productive. Goody’s aversion to the presentation of a ‘grand dichotomy’ between primitive and advanced societies, between anthropology and sociology, between them and us spurred his investigation of ‘cognitive developments in human culture’ (1977 : 8, 146 ff). He linked these ‘somewhat vague dichotomies’ through their characteristics, to ‘a third set of facts,’ namely, technological changes since the Bronze Age (c. 3000 bce) and the ‘technology of communication’ worldwide (1977 : 16). Convinced that ‘differences in cognitive processes could be looked at in a developmental way’ (1995 : 137), Goody proposed to study ‘non-European forms of literacy,’ the position of literates in predominantly oral communities, the ‘effect of literacy on human culture, especially in “traditional” or “pre-industrial” societies’ (1968 : 25), and the power of the written text – not only in enabling ancient empires and modern nations to dominate their non-literate counterparts, but also in empowering subordinated groups such as women and slaves.

Goody’s interest in comparative studies of cognition and the differences between non-literate and literate knowledge systems occupied him until the end of his life. He published seven books on this subject, including The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington, DC 2000a) and his penultimate book Myth, Ritual and the Oral (Cambridge 2010).

Table 3. Orality, literacy and the written tradition (7 books)

• (ed.) Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge 1968)
• The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge 1977)
• The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (Cambridge 1986)
• The Interface between the Written and the Oral (Cambridge 1987)
• Representations and Contradictions : Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fiction, Relics and Sexuality (Oxford 1997)
• The Power of the Written Tradition (Washington, DC 2000)
• Myth, Ritual and the Oral (Cambridge 2010)

All these books feature the Bagre myth and deal with the difference writing makes to oral memorization. Goody used the term ‘cognitive anthropology’ to describe his approach (e.g. 1995 : 143) and collaborated with the psychologists Sylvia Scribner, Michael Cole and David Olson on language and cognition. The latter two published a Festschrift containing essays on Goody’s oeuvre, including his work on orality and literacy (Olson and Cole 2006). [12] In 1990, the Fyssen Foundation awarded Goody the International Prize for Cognitive Studies.

He elaborated the concept of ‘technologies of the intellect,’ including speech, the alphabet, writing, lists, tables, etc., in a lecture at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC in 1989–90, and a seminar of the Max Planck Society project group Cognitive Anthropology at Berlin in 1990. Reprinted in his collection The Power of the Written Tradition (2000a), the paper concluded that ‘earlier discussions [of the history of writing in Greece, China and East Asia] now seem very ethnocentric, Eurocentric, or Near-East-centered’ (2000a : 140) [13].

Goody lectured on orality, literacy and power while attending conferences at the Whitney Humanities Center of Yale University, the first in November 1988, the second in February 1991. Both papers were published in Yale Journal of Criticism. During the second event, the Center’s Tenth Anniversary Symposium, he met Juliet Mitchell, a psychoanalyst and feminist writer. Brought together initially by shared disagreements with Martha Nussbaum, they began a conversation in New Haven that continued until Jack passed away in 2015. Having published two articles together in 1997 and 1999, they married in 2000. Thereafter, they read everything the other wrote and commented on each other’s work.

Goody’s studies of history in pre-industrial societies and of historians in literate societies in Eurasia were impressive but necessarily selective. He never once mentioned the historian August Ludwig Schlözer (1771), who coined the term ‘ethnology’ in German and formulated the principle that documented history begins with writing : ‘Before [the existence of] written documents, no history can be conceived [14].’ With this idea, Schlözer introduced modern chronology into historiography. Goody was certainly aware of this principle and adhered to it. As the universal historians Voltaire, Schlözer and Herder had done in the eighteenth century, he turned to world history because of its relevance for anthropology.

Comparative studies of culture and society

From 1991, in the last decades of his life, Goody’s work on ‘the contrasting socio-cultural situations in Africa and Eurasia’ (1995 : 139) expanded. He published ten more books, most of them detailed comparative investigations that were inter-continental if not global in scope. Their basis was laid in the POW camp in Germany where he had read Gordon Childe’s What Happened in History (1942). In his school days Goody had become interested in archaeology thanks to a schoolmaster at St Albans and excavations of the Roman town Verulamium under Mortimer Wheeler (1995 : 118 ; 2009b : 133). The Marxist prehistorian Childe was a main influence on Goody’s comparative historical work, although Goody never adopted a Marxist perspective in any formal sense. Childe had identified three stages in the evolution of production : the Neolithic Revolution, the Urban Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution (the latter term had been popularized by the economic historian Arnold Toynbee in the 1880s). Goody followed Childe in emphasizing technological and economic developments and in highlighting the Eurasian Urban Revolution of the Bronze Age as a pivotal moment in human history.

Arguably the finest result of Goody’s pursuit of the differences between Africa and Eurasia is The Culture of Flowers. Introduced as a ‘personal ethnography’ (1993a : xi), this book synthesized data on ‘the symbolic and transactional uses of flowers’ in Africa, the Near East and the Mediterranean as well as in India, Persia, China and Japan. The abundance of domestic flowers in Bali contrasted with their absence in Africa, so the culture of flowers could not be universal. ‘Visiting Bali and carrying out limited fieldwork with Esther Goody in Gujarat, India, I was amazed at the use of cultivated flowers, especially in worship, for which they were deliberately produced and purchased. This “non-utilitarian” form of agriculture was virtually absent from Africa, where the usual form of offering to a shrine is blood sacrifice’ (1995 : 139). In the opening chapter, ‘No flowers in Africa ?’ Goody posed the question ‘Why did flowers play so little a role in African life and so great a role in Asia and Europe ?’ (1993a : 18). He explained the contrast with reference to Cato’s De agri cultura and proposed to focus on ‘the problem of the uniqueness of the West that underlies so many approaches to the study of the growth of capitalism, of knowledge and of modern life as a whole’ (1993a : 3, 26).

Table 4. Comparative studies of culture and society (10 books)

• Cooking, Cuisine and Class : A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge 1982)
• The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge 1993)
• The East in the West (Cambridge 1996)
• Food and Love : A Cultural History of East and West (London 1998)
• Islam in Europe (Cambridge/Malden, MA 2004)
• Capitalism and Modernity : The Great Debate (Cambridge/Malden, MA 2004)
• The Theft of History (Cambridge 2006)
• Renaissances : The One or the Many ? (Cambridge 2009)
• The Eurasian Miracle (Cambridge/Malden, MA 2009)
• Metals, Culture and Capitalism : The Origins of the Modern World (Cambridge 2012)

Goody’s Food and Love : A Cultural History of East and West (1998) was a sequel to his Cooking, Cuisine and Class : A Study in Comparative Sociology (1982). Both were devoted primarily to the anthropology of food and beverages, in particular the ‘grand cuisine’ of China, India and the Muslim world. Arguing against ‘the uniqueness of Europe,’ ‘of Judaeo-Christian civilization’ (1998 ; 2004a : 7), he related the lack of haute cuisine in Africa among others to the fact that African societies had been ‘lacking many of the major inventions of the Bronze Age’ (1993 : 18).

In The East in the West (1996) Goody returned to the issue of ‘the uniqueness of the West’ with a focus on the tendency of both Marx and Weber in the heyday of capitalism to view the East as ‘static’ or ‘backward.’ The notion that ‘Europeans were “almost another order of beings” was not simply ethnocentrism … but … based upon the achievements of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment.’ In the view of Marx, Asia had taken ‘the road to a stagnant “oriental” form of society,’ based on irrigation, that is, the road of ‘Asiatic exceptionalism.’ At issue was ‘the nature of the Uniqueness (which all societies obviously possess) in relation to the gap that grew up in this period’ (1996 : 2–4). Asian exceptionalism was also discussed in The Power of the Written Tradition. However, ‘Asia has never been the stagnant oriental society of which European writers have written’ (1995 : 132–33). During the Middle Ages, the East had been pre-eminent in many fields. Moreover, Europe was not the only part of the Eurasian landmass able to modernize in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus, Eurocentrism fails to explain the achievements of the East and misrepresents Western history. An appendix to The East in the West lists the ‘early links between East and West.’

In a short sequel, Islam in Europe (2004a), Goody argued that Islam had played a central role in European history, both militarily and culturally. Three routes had led Islam into Europe : with the Arabs through North Africa, Spain and Mediterranean Europe ; the Turks through Greece and the Balkans ; and the Mongols through Southern Russia into Poland and Lithuania. He estimated that by 2004, Europe had incorporated some eleven million immigrants. The book included a review of developments in Europe and Asia under the title ‘Bitter Icons and Ethnic Cleansing’ that was originally published in the New Left Review (2001).

Goody would continue to analyze factors separating the West from the East, factors ‘leading to “modernisation”, industrialisation and capitalism, the “economic miracle”’ (1996 : 5). Books like Capitalism and Modernity : The Great Debate (2004b), The Theft of History (2006a) and Renaissances (2009a) enlarged the argument, bringing in ever more comparative material and critical analysis. The ‘great debate’ of Capitalism and Modernity concerned the economic rise of the West and the question when and how Europe had transitioned to capitalism, industrialization and modernity (2004b : 16). Dedicated to the memory of the historian Peter Laslett, and the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure he had founded, Goody was critical of part of their work. He could not accept the way some historians emphasised the demographic and family differences of East and West and described the Great Debate as Eurocentric, insisting that modern is ‘a moving target’ (2004b : 3–6) and modernity a fleeting concept.

The Theft of History builds on The East in the West and deals with the take-over of history by the West, the ‘stealing’ of the achievements of ‘other cultures’ (a term borrowed from John Beattie’s 1964 textbook) in such fields as democracy, capitalism, individualism and love. Goody discussed a number of theorists, including Joseph Needham, Norbert Elias and Fernand Braudel, arguing that ‘while most historians aim to avoid ethnocentricity (like theology), they rarely succeed in doing so because of their limited knowledge of the other (including their own beginnings). That limitation often leads them to make unsustainable claims … about the uniqueness of the west’ (2006a : 4). Their Eurocentric, or Occidentalist, bias has prevented them from recognizing that Europe and Asia shared socio-cultural features since the Urban Revolution of the Bronze Age, which Africa had missed out on. Yet the ‘many similarities between Europe and Asia in modes of production, communication, and destruction become more apparent when contrasted with Africa’ (2006a : 3) – ‘at a time when notions of “global history” are filtering into the historical mainstream for the first time.’

In Renaissances : The One or the Many ? (2009a), Goody raised the question : ‘does the European Renaissance deserve its unique status at the heart of western notions of modernity ?’ In addition to the rise of science and civilization in sixteenth-century Europe, and the golden age in Persia during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, he identified not one but five Renaissances : in Europe, Islamic countries, Jewish cultural history, India and China. Dedicated to Eric Hobsbawm, this work included three chapters co-written with Stephen Fennell : ‘Rebirth in Islam,’ ‘Cultural Continuity in India,’ and ‘Renaissance in China.’ Goody added an introduction on ‘The Idea of a Renaissance,’ as well as chapters on the Renaissance in Italy and France, and on Sephardic and Ashkenazi Judaism in Andalusia and elsewhere. The conclusion was crystal clear : ‘renascences’ were by no means restricted to Europe.

Another volume dismantling Eurocentrism is The Eurasian Miracle (2009b). Peter Burke, expert on the European Renaissance, described it as ‘one more nail into the coffin of Western ethnocentrism [15].’ This title harked back to a paper Goody presented at a 1985 conference in Cambridge on ‘The European Miracle,’ in which he had provoked a discussion by asking ‘Why European and not Eurasian ?’ In his response to contributions in a special section titled ‘Occidentalism : Jack Goody and Comparative History’ in the journal Theory, Culture & Society, the master, knighted in 2005, advanced the position that arguments for ‘the uniqueness of the west’ put forward by Europeanists such as ‘Marx, Weber, Braudel, Laslett’ were ‘mistaken, even teleological’ and ‘overlooked the contributions of the east to “modernization,” mechanization and industrialization’ (2009b : 2–4) [16]. On the basis of extensive reading and repeated visits to India, Japan and China, Goody concluded that ‘it appears that the period of western supremacy is now coming to an end’ and he predicted that ‘we are about to experience a further alternation in favour of the east’ (2009b : back cover).

For Goody, China should be seen as a long-term structural equivalent of Europe. China’s rise in the twenty-first century confirmed that the ‘miracle’ of the modern world was not a European event but a Eurasian one. The argument that China had developed a form of capitalism without having had feudalism was ‘mistaken precisely because it was teleological, that is to say, it started from the present situation and looked back at history, defining the past and the categories for analyzing it in that light, rather than looking at them as a Ding an sich, as themselves.’ Such a ‘forward-thinking’ view was teleological. It is ‘ethnocentric to think that industrial production itself developed only in that corner of Europe [Britain].’ Therefore, ‘Europe needed to broaden its perspective to include Asian history, Asian sociology and Asian anthropology, and see itself in this wider context’ (2004c, this volume, pp. 10-12).

Goody’s last book, Metals, Culture and Capitalism : The Origins of the Modern World, another masterpiece, pointed out that the smelting of metals was only one aspect of urban civilization :

The fact that the book is largely about metals should not make us forget the other aspects of urban civilisation, the spread of literacy and of written religions. All these are linked together and it is a mistake completely to separate off the two spheres, as so many do, both scientists and humanists. Given the frequent use in the humanities of the dichotomy between sciences (and technology) and the arts (and communication), I must stress that I am not seeking to exclude one or the other (nor yet the religions or the secular) but to trace the connections in a rounded (anthropological) view (2012a : xi-xii ; italics added).

His final article, ‘Asia and Europe’ (2015) once again outlined the similarities and differences between Europe and Asia. Written in 2013 and published online in History and Anthropology on 7 July 2015, nine days before his passing, Goody reaffirmed the need to challenge ‘the widely held perceptions about the supremacy of the West in the context of world history.’ The similarities observed in Eurasian cultures are more important than the differences : ‘The essay documents the unity across Eurasia as an interconnected landmass, the legacies of the common Bronze Age of the Ancient Near East, its associated plough agriculture, and the traditions of writing and use of metals in order to reassess the primacy of material resource endowments in shaping human history’ (2015 : 263). In reality, he insisted, civilizations in East and West alternate and there is no basis for assuming western superiority.

History of anthropology

Goody’s love of history extended to the history of anthropology. He published a book on this subject, The Expansive Moment : The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918–1970 (1995), and about twenty articles [17]. Adorned with a cover picture portraying Meyer Fortes ‘observing a prayer-offering’ prior to a ritual sacrifice in Tongo (Tallensi District, northern Ghana) in 1936, this book makes extensive use of the Fortes papers held in the University Library at Cambridge to review Fortes’s career (1995 : chapters 2, 3 and 4, Appendix 1). Goody discussed the friendship between Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, their vital role in building social anthropology in Britain, and the latter’s dislike of Malinowski : ‘When I first attended Friday seminars in Oxford in 1949 … I was surprised at the level of animosity against Malinowski displayed by Evans-Pritchard’ (1995 : 70). After 1946, ‘social anthropology was increasingly separated from the fields of human biology, archaeology and museum work’ – ‘partly under pressure from the Association of Social Anthropologists.’ Thanks to ‘strong and effective leadership’ – Evans-Pritchard at Oxford, Fortes at Cambridge, Gluckman at Manchester, Raymond Firth and later Isaac Schapera and Lucy Mair at the London School of Economics, Daryll Forde at University College, London – ‘the highly amorphous subject of anthropology … was given some manageable bounds’ (1995 : 82–83).

Goody’s assessments of the rise and consolidation of social anthropology are not uniformly positive. He recognizes his own participation in this ‘tribal phase’ from 1949 on [18]. When listing the ethnographic projects funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, and the resulting monographs, he calls this period ‘the expansive moment’ of social anthropology (1995 : 85–86, 158). Yet elsewhere he speaks about breaking disciplinary boundaries, and indeed we can interpret much of his work as a series of attempts to transcend the confines of social anthropology in British academia. Goody was not content to limit anthropology to fieldwork and theory (e.g. Fortes 1953 ; Kuper 1973). He wanted to connect with wider trends in international academia.

Goody was a regular guest at conferences in France and Italy. He was Directeur d’Études Associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris for seven terms between 1973 and 1987, and attended the anniversary conference of Germaine Dieterlen in June 2001. He was a close friend of Maurice Godelier and Martine Segalen. Visits to Italy (where he received numerous awards and where dozens of his publications were translated) were also important, as were visits to the USA (especially Stanford and Yale). Goody knew American academia well, even though the Americas, along with Australia, were never well integrated into his comparative studies. He also lectured in Germany on several occasions [19].

In the sixty years of his scholarly career, Jack Goody published 46 books, including 32 books and 14 edited volumes. Cambridge University Press published 22 of these : 15 books and 7 edited volumes. Many of his books are major monographs ; other books are collections of articles, published previously in journals or handbooks. Most of his books were translated in foreign languages. His bibliography lists 370 articles, of which only 22 are reviews. He was interviewed on 36 occasions and featured in at least four documentary films [20].

His bibliography also includes two unpublished books (a memoir and a collection of articles). In an appendix, his unpublished documents, field notes, audio-visual material, recordings and offprints are listed [21]. In his war memoir, Beyond the Walls (1992), mostly written in a POW camp in southern Germany, Goody looked back on his six-month stay among illiterate shepherds in Italy, during which he became interested ‘aux paysans des Abruzzes et au milieu cosmopolite de la haute société romaine’ (Goody 2004d). Written from the perspective of a character called Stephen (an allusion to Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus is unmistakable), this book appeared first in Italian (1997) and then in French (2004).

Some questions remain unanswered. Goody’s 2004 CV lists dozens of trips to France, the USA, India, China, Taiwan, Japan, Brazil, Sweden, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Hungary, Switzerland, Norway, Morocco, Tunisia, Ghana, Singapore, Syria, Turkey, Israel and Egypt [22]. An inventory list of his foreign travels and fellowships, as well as a list of his lectures and the interviews he gave would be revealing. Also, it would be instructive to examine how Goody’s books and articles were reviewed in the literature. How was his work received in the Americas and in various European, Asian or African countries ? Did he comment on American scholarship ? Which works exist in translation ?

Conclusion

‘What I have done is to try and place such remarks [from correspondence] in a wider context of understanding, the verstehen of the anthropologist’
(Goody 1995 : 6)

During the sixty years of his scholarly career, Jack Goody moved from one academic field to another, accumulating interests. In his view, anthropology should be a cumulative science. He combined ethnography, social anthropology, comparative sociology, historical anthropology, economic anthropology, cognitive anthropology and world history in an effort to ‘contribute towards the understanding of the differences and similarities between North and South on the one hand, and West and East on the other’ (1993a : xv).

Instead of limiting anthropology to conventional subjects such as kinship and marriage, inheritance and religion, Goody’s view of anthropology was both dynamic and comprehensive. He regarded anthropology as comparative sociology, ‘not limited to Western Europe,’ and widened its scope : ethnography was an elementary part of social anthropology but history should also be included. In his view, social anthropology consisted of ethnography combined with theoretical concerns, but it should be combined with comparative and historical studies : ‘the fieldworker with a wide comparative background (that is, in the range of pre-industrial societies) has a positive role to play in contemporary social science. The documentary techniques of the historian cannot be ignored’ (1975 : viii). Having started in 1949 with the most recent ideas of British social anthropology – fieldwork and theory – Goody soon began to innovate by strengthening the comparative approach of international sociology and by expanding his interest in history through studies in Africa, the Near East and Eurasia.

Goody was not the only anthropologist interested in comparative studies. In fact, comparison is inherent to all anthropology in that ethnographers compare their own views and experiences with those of others. But he added the comparative method to that of fieldwork-based anthropology. In his own work, he increasingly invested so much history that he combined socio-historical anthropology with world history and with economic and cognitive studies. He legitimately added ‘a third set of facts’ in his consideration of the role of technological changes since the Bronze Age (1977 : 16, 146).

In an obituary, Keith Hart (2016) sketched three major moves in Goody’s thinking. Firstly, during his fieldwork in Ghana, while the Gold Coast was undergoing an ‘anti-colonial revolution’ Goody ‘switched to the precolonial history of West African kingdoms’ and ‘led the move from ethnography to history that marked African anthropology then and African Studies in general today.’ Secondly, he proposed, from the early 1960s on, that the discipline of social anthropology, which had been founded by Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes in the 1930s and 40s, ‘should be renamed comparative sociology’ – ‘a new synthesis of sociology, politics and anthropology’ – ‘much to the dismay of Meyer Fortes.’ Thirdly, after succeeding Fortes as head of the department, Goody no longer tried ‘to merge social anthropology with sociology and politics’ but ‘soon launched his series of books on world history, at first contrasting Africa with Eurasia,’ beginning with Production and Reproduction in 1976 (Hart 2016 : 27) and continuing right up to his last book, Metals (2012a).

Goody’s attitudes toward social anthropology shifted in the course of his career. In an essay on ‘The Prospects for Social Anthropology’ (1966b) in New Society, a weekly magazine of social inquiry published in the UK, he suggested that anthropology could either become social archaeology, a branch of historical sociology based on its ‘traditional preserve,’ or morph into comparative sociology. Making an early case for a ‘decolonisation of the social sciences,’ Goody found the distinction between sociology and social anthropology in Britain to be xenophobic, as if sociology comprised the study of complex societies and social anthropology that of simple societies. In the new nations, however, their ‘other culture’ was ‘our sociology’ (1966b : 576, cited in Peirano 1998). Continuing this line of inquiry in his article ‘Comparative Sociology and the Decolonization of the Social Sciences’ (1969b), he later specified that the ‘study of new nations … helps to break down the barriers between disciplines’ (1975 : ix). Goody observed, perhaps clearer than other scholars, that the West’s dominant position was evaporating because many emerging nation-states in Africa and elsewhere were resisting neo-colonialist practices.

The question of disciplinary boundaries and ‘the barriers between disciplines’ was a serious issue for Goody. His interest in history was so profound that, at the end of an interview with Eric Hobsbawm, filmed by Alan Macfarlane, he declared that his major contribution to anthropology lay in the ‘recording of unrecorded myths’ (the myth of the Bagre, published in three versions in 1972, 1980 and 2004) and in ‘pointing out the value of historical facts for anthropology and the comparison of societies now and in the past’ (Macfarlane 1991).

Goody’s view of anthropology was broad, much wider than the ‘omnibus subject’ signaled by Fortes in 1953. He continuously combined material from one field with that of another, usually several other fields. Sometimes the earlier interests (history, archaeology, literary studies) returned. His professional identity as an anthropologist often seemed too limiting. He wanted to break out and regularly did so. Or, perhaps he never stopped adding to the framework he had created : a comparative study of similarities and differences between the East and the West, the North and the South, including studies of culture and society in Africa, Europe, Asia and the Near East.

John Rankine Goody, a.k.a. Jack Goody, was a complicated person, composed of several persona. Combining findings from social anthropology, historical and economic anthropology, cognitive anthropology, global history and world sociology, he could shift identities from being an ethnographer to a ‘comparative sociologist,’ from ‘a kind of anthropologist’ to a world historian. He was not afraid to cross boundaries and juggled identities in the process. His transnational network warrants historical analysis in order to assess how it reflects in his published work and its impact. Also, a study of how his work was reviewed internationally would be welcome.

This would help answer the question regarding Goody’s legacy in anthropology and the world today. His published record is clear-cut but extensive and complex. It seems highly relevant in the contemporary multipolar world, and surely deserves deeper scrutiny.

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