‘Jack Goody between Social Anthropology and World History’ edited by Chris Hann and Han F. Vermeulen

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.

Goody was not the only one who tried to give social anthropology a new breath of life in the times of a disciplinary reinvention that led many away from writing on small-scale societies. Ernest Gellner developed his interests in the sociology of modernity and world history and became an influential figure in the study of European nationalism; Mary Douglas focused on domestic consumption and risk perception in modern societies, and later enriched Biblical scholarship; and Talal Asad directed anthropology towards broader discussions of Islam and secularism. However, compared to them, Goody appears the most versatile and the most productive. His intellectual ventures left the staggering numbers of 32 books and 14 edited volumes. He published his last book while 92 years old.

Goody’s interests seem to have been incredibly varied, yet we find some common themes. Goody disrespected disciplinary boundaries. He defied the anthropological orthodoxy by restoring the relevance of historico-developmental questions, which had been sent on a long hiatus by the exponents of the British school. He was staunchly anti-Eurocentric and challenged the classical exceptionalist narrative of Europe’s origins in Ancient Greece and Rome. Finally, Goody believed in cumulative science. All these traits left marks on his broadly conceived project on Eurasia, later developed by his Cambridge student Chris Hann at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. Goody was perhaps the first anthropologist who took a systematic interest in what would be today called non-human protagonists. His early comparative attempts to explain the absence of feudalism in Africa are not limited to social factors but also consider the presence or absence of particular metals, technologies, and animals. At around the same time, we find the Edinburgh school struggling to recognize the capacities of non-humans. Similarly, Goody’s works on literacy show how this peculiar technology allows for certain modes of thought that would not otherwise be possible. In short, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism is not quite savage because to emerge, it requires the invention of literacy in the first place.

Jack Goody’s biography is yet to be written and his place in the development of social sciences and humanities yet to be fully explored. Fortunately, Chris Hann and Han Vermeulen, colleagues from Halle, took the first step in the direction of any future biography with Jack Goody between Social Anthropology and World History. The book appeared as the fiftieth volume in the Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia published in Lit Verlag in 2024. The bulk of the volume contains Goody’s 2004 lecture on Eurasia delivered in Halle and the Jack Goody Lectures that took place between 2011–2022, including many leading names among the lecturers. Although the lectures are a testimony to the intellectual afterlife and dissemination of Goody’s ideas, the last four pieces will be of most interest to historians of anthropology and prospective biographers of Goody. Together, the last section conveys a fine impression of the life and work of Jack Goody. The first in this section (Chapter 14) is Hann’s reprinted memoir of Goody, which originally appeared in 2017 in Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy. The second (Chapter 15) is Vermeulen’s systematic overview of Goody’s intellectual endeavours; this is a corrected and updated version of an earlier 2004 biography. In Chapter 16, Vermeulen supplements his essay with an annotated bibliography of Goody’s works, including interviews and unpublished writing. The last piece is by Adam Crothers of Special Collections at Cambridge University’s St. John’s College, where Jack Goody’s manuscript papers are held. The entire last section makes for an excellent introduction to Jack Goody’s work, and in addition to standard historical and biographical information, the authors offer more intimate remarks that give a sense of the kind of individual Jack Goody was.^[1]Similar remarks can be found in a short portrait by Petr Skalník. See: “A Giant with Encyclopaedic Knowledge : A Short Biography (and Personal Portrait) of Jack Goody,” Encyclopédie Bérose des histoires de l’anthropologie (2021).

Despite his extraordinary achievements, Goody is rarely remembered as a significant figure in standard historical accounts of anthropology. For example, in Adam Kuper’s classic history of the British school, Goody is merely depicted as Fortes’s associate or lieutenant (Kuper 2015, xi, 97). Barth’s overview in One Discipline, Four Ways does more justice to Goody but remains cursory (Barth et al. 2005, 53–54). It seems as if Goody’s early career was too orthodox to be remembered, while his later career was too maverick to be considered anthropological at all. Hence, the volume is a welcome first step towards a biography-length evaluation of Goody’s place in both social anthropology and the wider realm of social sciences and humanities.

Works Cited

Barth, Fredrik. Andre Gingrich, Robert Parkin, and Sydel Silverman. 2005. One Discipline, Four Ways: British, German, French, and American Anthropology. University of Chicago Press.

Gell, Alfred. 1999. The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, edited by Eric Hirsch. Athlone Press.

Kuper, Adam. 2015. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The British School in the Twentieth Century. Routledge.

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