Jack Goody

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Jack Goody (born 1918 or 1919) is a British social anthropologist.

[edit] Biography

Goody grew up in Welwyn Garden City and St Albans, where he attended St Albans School . He went up to St John's College, Cambridge to study English Literature in 1938, where he came to know left intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm. Fighting in North Africa in World War II, he was captured by the Germans and spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camps. Inspired by reading Frazer's Golden Bough and Gordon Childe, he transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology when he resumed university study in 1946. After fieldwork in Gonja in northern Ghana, Goody increasingly turned to comparative study of Europe, Africa and Asia. Between 1954 and 1984 he taught social anthropology at Cambridge University.

Goody has pioneered the comparative anthropology of literacy, attempting to gauge the causal preconditions and effects of writing as a technology. He also wrote substantially on the history of the family and the anthropology of inheritance. More recently, he has written on the anthropology of flowers and food.

[edit] Works

• The social organisation of the LoWiili
• Death, Property and the Ancestors: A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1962).
• ed., Literacy in Traditional Societies (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1968); translated into German and Spanish.
• The Myth of the Bagre (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1972).
• ed., The Character of Kinship (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973).
• The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977); translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish.
• Cooking,Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1982); translated into Spanish, French and Portuguese.
• The Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983); translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese.
• The Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986); translated into German, French, Italian, Polish, Portuguese.
• The Culture of Flowers (Cambridge, 1993); translated into French and Italian.
• The Expansive Moment: Anthropology in Britain and Africa,1918-1970 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995).
• The East in the West (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996); translated into French and Italian.
• Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images,Theatre,Fictions,Relics and Sexuality (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1997); translated into Spanish.
• Love and Food (London, Verso, 1998).
• The European Family (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 2000).

[edit] External links

• Maria Lúcia Pallares-Burke, interview with Jack Goody. Chapter 1 of The New History: Confessions and Conversations (Polity Press, 2002). ISBN 0-7456-3020-0