POWER OF WRITTEN TRADITION PB

by Jack Goody

In this collection of nine essays, noted anthropologist Jack Goody explores his view of writing as a transforming technology, charting the differences between cultures with writing and those without in such practices as historical record keeping, religious ceremony, and the telling of time. He describes how one version of a ritual---the Bagre of the loDagaa of northern Ghana---assumed primacy over other versions when it was written down, and he shows that as societies acquired writing, verbatim memorization rather than face-to-face interaction became a mainstay of education.

Genres: Language

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2000

About the author

Sir John (Jack) Rankine Goody (born 27 July 1919) is a British social anthropologist. He has been a prominent teacher at Cambridge University, he was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1976,[1] and he is an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. Among his main publications are Death, property and the ancestors (1962), The myth of the Bagre (1972) and The domestication of the savage mind.

Jack Goody explained social structure and social change primarily in terms of three major factors. The first was the development of intensive forms of agriculture that allowed for the accumulation of surplus – surplus explained many aspects of cultural practice from marriage to funerals as well as the great divide between African and Eurasian societies. Second, he explained social change in terms of urbanization and growth of bureaucratic institutions that modified or overrode traditional forms of social organization, such as family or tribe, identifying civilization as “the culture of cities”. And third, he attached great weight to the technologies of communication as instruments of psychological and social change. He associated the beginnings of writing with the task of managing surplus and, in an important paper with Ian Watt (Goody and Watt, 1963), he advanced the argument that the rise of science and philosophy in classical Greece depended importantly on their invention of an efficient writing system, the alphabet. Because these factors could be applied to either to any contemporary social system or to systematic changes over time, his work is equally relevant to many disciplines.