Goody, Jack (1919-2015)

British social anthropologist and Africanist John Rankine Goody, known as Jack Goody (1919-2015), is among the most prolific, influential, and world-renowned anthropologists of his time. A student of Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard in the late 1940s, he was an Africanist fieldworker who carried out five-year research among the “stateless” and “chiefless” LoWiili and LoDagaa of north-western Ghana (then the Gold Coast). An original thinker and an erudite student of culture across centuries, Goody was a comparative anthropologist interested in both Africa and Eurasia. As a historian of social structure, he wrote extensively on the family in three continents. He dedicated several studies to the distinction between the logic of writing and orally transmitted knowledge, such as Literacy in Traditional Societies (1968), The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (1986), The Interface between the Written and the Oral (1987), and The Power of the Written Tradition (2000). Goody authored and edited more than forty books, including The Expansive Moment: The Rise of Social Anthropology in Britain and Africa, 1918–1970 (1995), an insider’s view on the history and the archive of British social anthropology. Knighted in 2005 for his services to anthropology, Goody remains himself a key figure in disciplinary history, both in Britain and internationally.

Keywords: Social anthropology | Political anthropology | History of Anthropology | British colonialism | 20^th century | United Kingdom | Ghana | Comparison | African Studies | Asian studies | European Studies | Family and kinship | Cultural history | Rituals | Kinship anthropology | Myths | Islam | Food anthropology | Capitalism | Writing | Orality | Flower | Social Organization