Jack Goody

Asia and Europe

In this extended essay, Jack Goody summarizes his long-standing intellectual effort to develop a comparative historical anthropology that would challenge the widely held perceptions about the supremacy of the West in the context of world history. Throughout the essay, Goody focuses on the similarities existing in all Eurasian cultures to turn much of European history and historiography on its head. 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. Goody presents a series of characteristics conventionally cited in the West as evidence of the uniqueness of Europe and shows that, in each and every case, equivalents can be found in Asia, and notably in China.

Adoption in Cross-Cultural Perspective

Adoption plays a major part in the traditional law of many Eurasian societies. It occupies a large portion of Maynes Treatise on Hindu Law and Usage (1878). The Babylonian code of Hammu-rabi, the oldest comprehensive set of written laws, gives a prominent position to ‘Adoption and Wet-nursing’ (Driver and Miles, 1952: 383–406). And the institution receives the same kind of attention in the law of China, Greece and Ancient Rome. Theoretically it has been of central importance in the writings of Sir Henry Maine and Fustel de Coulanges, where it is linked to the perpetuation of corporations of agnates over time.

Inheritance, Property, and Marriage in Africa and Eurasia

This paper tries to utilize the cross-cultural material presented by G. P. Murdock in the Ethnographic Atlas to analyse the concomitants of differences in the system of inheritance, particularly with respect to the contrast between Africa and Eurasia. In the major Eurasian societies property tends to be distributed directly, from parents to children of both sexes (i.e. by diverging devolution); in Africa property largely devolves between persons of the same sex, laterally as well as lineally. An attempt is made to show the distribution of diverging devolution and its association with the payment of dowry, with monogamy, with in-marriage of various sorts, and with kin terms that differentiate the nuclear family from more distant kin. The tight control of property represented by diverging devolution is in turn seen as deriving from the intensive exploitation of resources which is also linked to the growth of complex political institutions. These associations are tested and held to be established.

Anomie in Ashanti

Miss Ward, in her paper on Some Observations on Religious Cults in Ashanti , maintains that the spread of ‘new witch-finding cults’ in Ashanti results from an emotional malaise deriving from structural changes in the society. The hypothesis is one which has been put forward on other occasions to account for the reported increase in such activities. The basic propositions appear to be four: firstly, that major changes in the social system increase the overall malaise in a society: secondly, that such increased malaise will be reflected in an increase in witchcraft: thirdly, that an increase in witchcraft will be reflected in an increase in witch-finding cults: fourthly, that there has been such an increase in Ashanti.

Flowers and bones: approaches to the dead in Anglo-American and Italian cemeteries

The profusion of fresh flowers in Italian graveyards amazed nineteenth-century travellers from America used to more severe practices. In England, too, flowers were sparse. Nor was their paucity unintentional. Strong sentiments were involved, for despite the increasing pomp of Victorian funerals, much ambivalence was displayed about elaborate rituals and offerings in the Anglo-American world—“a green grassy turf is all I crave,” wrote Beattie in the Minstrel . Even Loudon, the great architect of the new rural cemeteries in England, was reluctant to make a place for flowers in his plans.

Strategies of Heirship

The prologue to the great Chinese autobiographical novel of the eighteenth century, Dream of the Red Chamber , contains the following passage, in which the author sets the scene for the story: Chen Shih-Ying was without aspirations to fame or fortune. He devoted his time to planting bamboo and watering flowers and sipping wine and writing poems. He led an idyllic life. Unfortunately he lacked one thing to complete his happiness: he was over half a hundred years of age and had no son. Only a three-year-old daughter named Lotus filled his bosom (p. 9).

Rice Burning and the Green Revolution in Northern Ghana

The introduction of high yielding varieties into northern Ghana has given rise to a form of mechanised farming of rice in the river valleys. Much of this land was used only for occasional pasture; now it is cultivated by civil servants, military men, traders and farmers from the locality and from neighbouring areas, who have been encouraged by government policy and by the prospect of private gain. In the course of establishing these large farms, the system of land tenure has been radically changed, since written evidence of registration is necessary to raise a loan and to be produced in case of dispute. These changes, combined with the more direct effects of social differentiation, have resulted in the burning of rice and the destruction of machinery.

The Bedouin of Cyrenaica: studies in personal and corporate power

List of illustrations Foreword Jack Goody Preface Introduction Emanuel Marx 1. The Sanusi order and the Bedouin 2. The Bedouin way of life 3. The tied and the free 4. Aspects of the feud 5. Proliferation of segments 6. The power of shaikhs 7. Debt relationships 8. Family and marriage 9. Bridewealth 10. The status of women Notes Bibliography Index.

Feudalism in Africa

Was feudalism a purely Western phenomenon? Is it a universal stage in mans history, emphasizing replacement of kinship by ties of personal dependence which further social development required? If it is neither a universal prerequisite nor yet exclusively Western, what are the conditions under which it is found? A host of such questions are raised by the consistent use both by historians and sociologists of the term ‘feudal’ as a description of the societies they are studying. Here I want to inquire into the implications and value of the concept as applied to African societies.

The Transcription of Oral Heritage

Jack Goody is a fellow of St John’s College and emeritus professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. He is the author of many books, among them The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society (1986). His recent books include The European Family: An Historico-Anthropological Essay (2000) and Food and Love: A Cultural History of East and West (1998).