It is hard to do full scholarly justice to John Rankine Goody (1919–2015), a rare occurrence in the anthropological world of the latter twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Originally a student of literature at Cambridge, Goody switched to anthropology shortly after the Second World War and became an Africanist baptized by fieldwork in Ghana. In the early stage of his career, Goody was an integral member of the structural functionalist orthodoxy of the British school, though of a younger cohort than its top leaders. Alfred Gell would later recall that as a student at Cambridge he had viewed Goody, in the spirit of undergraduate silliness, as a sidekick to the “functionalist Satan” Meyer Fortes (Gell 1999, 4). Among Goody’s specializations was the emblematic and arcane field—kinship studies—that, at the time, bore witness to some of the most esoteric discussions.

If Goody’s early career was marked by belonging to an orthodoxy, his later career clearly defies any simple pigeonholing. Already before he replaced Fortes as William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University in 1973, he had started to tinker with topics that were rather uncommon among his colleagues, for instance, the role of agricultural technology or orality and literacy in the organization of society. He later developed his interests into several books, progressively becoming a specialist on topics as diverse as domestic production and reproduction, cognitive anthropology, cooking, flowers, metals, history of anthropology, comparative world history, and historical sociology. Even if he shared these concerns with Marxists, postmodernists, and cognitive anthropologists from the 1970s onwards,  he did not belong to any of these camps.

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Twenty years after its first release, Thomas Patterson, a UC Riverside anthropologist, brings us the second edition of his book on the history of US anthropology. The material from the first edition has been revised and updated, and the new edition contains an additional chapter which deals with the most recent developments in US anthropology.

The book narrates a history of US anthropology in six chapters. It begins in the early modern period and ends in the year 2019. This temporal frame suggests that Patterson does not view anthropology as a discipline that began with its professionalization in the twentieth century. Instead, he takes anthropology to encompass a broader set of intellectual practices that have sought to understand otherness. This allows Patterson to discuss the ideas of Franz Boas, Eric Wolf, and Eleanor Leacock on a par with those of Enlightenment philosophers, early modern naturalists, and the Founding Fathers—meaning his history of US anthropology includes anthropological ideas circulating in North America well before the United States came into being.

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