The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society BYGoody

Studies in Literacy, the Family, Culture and the State

by goody, Lemmon (Introduction)

This book assesses the impact of writing on human societies, both in the Ancient Near East and in twentieth-century Africa, and highlights some general features of social systems that have been influenced by this major change in the mode of communication. Such features are central to any attempt at the theoretical definition of human society and such constituent phenomena as religious and legal systems, and in this study Professor Goody explores the role of a specific mechanism, the introduction of writing and the development of a written tradition, in the explanation of some important social differences and similarities. Goody argues that a shift of emphasis from productive to certain communicative processes is essential to account adequately for major changes in human societies. Whilst there have been previous descussions of the effect of literacy upon social organisation, no study has hitherto presented the general synthesis developed here.

Genres: Sociology, Anthropology, Nonfiction, History, Linguistics, Language, Philosophy

Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

Reviews

[نرگس · Rating 4 out of 5]

کتاب درخشان، دشوارخوان و جالب دیگری از جک گودی.

[Gary Bruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Or to revert to the earlier classification, why are they primitive and we advanced? We try to state the nature of these differences in very general terms—the move from myth to history, from magic to science, from status to contract, cold to hot, concrete to abstract, collective to individual, ritual to rationality. Such movement inevitably tends to be phrased not only in terms of process but of progress too; in other words it acquires a value element.”
--Jack Goody, “Evolution and Communication: The Domestication of the Savage Mind”

Writing is a technology like no other. It is no less a technique for power and dominion over the souls, minds, and bodies of plain folks everywhere. How is this so? Well, since the dawn of history, a largely unnoticed army of priests, courtiers, bureaucrats, merchants, lawyers, scientists, journalists, and many other literates have employed writing to channel cognitive order and to sustain a social organization. It should come as no surprise that the introduction of writing has without fail altered the historical trajectory of civilizations, not only in the place where writing first emerged, in ancient Mesopotamia, but also in modern contexts, like post-colonial Africa. After reading Goody, I feel it remains to be seen how his ‘logic of writing’ should be applied in the future as we move to a post-print era of virtual (il)literacies and of refracted and emergent social (dis)organizations.

Writing is invariably perceived as magic by those new to the idea. And writing does appear to do magical things. With writing, it suddenly becomes possible to communicate at a distance. This can be physical distance, as when sending a message far away, or it can be social distance, as when the face-to-face audience with the king comes to be replaced by a literate legion of bureaucrats standing between the individual people and their leadership. The technology of writing also makes it possible for all kinds of information to be stored and later retrieved, thereby extending the life of the word through time as well as across space, like magic.

Writing plays an important role in religion, especially for the world’s largest religions. Writing can lead to the development of bodies of scripture. These scriptures generate orthodoxies, inviolable and closed systems of truth which demand total allegiance to the fixed word of God.

The technology of writing is moreover a prerequisite for any advanced mathematics, math being obviously important for science, but also crucial for commerce and trade. For mathematics enables the symbolic abstraction of number away from the objects to be counted, and this numerical skill leads to the adoption of another transformative technology, money.

Goody insists that the adoption of literacy changes both how people think as individuals and how they organize themselves in larger groups. In part this is because writing is instrumental in reducing and reordering complexity. Thus, both the particular local custom and the facts of the individual case are reduced to (made to fit) a universal code of law. Law reduces the chaos of events to the order of the rule. The legal code’s authority spreads across both time and space in its universal standardization of individual situations. In enabling comprehension of the particular case in terms of the universal rule, writing moreover makes it possible to distinguish the person from the office as well as to separate the individuals from the corporation.

A people’s adoption of writing can certainly be a unifying and even conservative force. Yet in other ways, writing moves a culture from collectivism to individualism. For example, rites of passage (rituals marking changes in social category: births, initiations, marriages, and funerals) in the days before writing were validated and certified by the village, totem, or tribe coming together to mourn or celebrate collectively, thereby forming an important social memory that the appropriate rite of passage had taken place. After writing, this validation of status is handled by bureaucrats in a more private way (birth certificates, diplomas, marriage licenses, and death certificates). Rituals and celebrations are still important, and will always remain so. Yet under modernity, one’s legal persona is managed by the state and no longer by local custom or tradition.

The technology of writing has always required a base of specialists. In the beginning, the skill of writing was restricted to priests and Brahmans, those experts who kept and preserved the word of the gods and goddesses. The power of writing was also important to the state, which needed writing in order to rationalize the state apparatus according to the writ of the ruler, or else by means of universal and eternal writings of law and equity. And while the bureaucrats were busy passing communications up and down the state-bureaucracy ladder, merchants used writing in order to devise systems of credit and banking. As a function of literacy, long-distance communication made long-distance trade feasible.

As commerce grew, contract, title, and testimony became important vehicles for a legal system with its own set of writing experts: lawyers, judges, prosecutors. Legal writings were kept to serve as objects for future reference, for clarification, for guarantee, or for precedent.

After being standardized and thereby frozen for many centuries, scholarly languages became the exclusive property of clerics and classicists, at least in some communities. Their canonical texts eventually became mumbo-jumbo to folk untrained in reading the dead languages. Through being written down and standardized long ago, languages like Buddhist Pali, Hindu Sanskrit, and Christian Latin outlived their vernacular speakers by millennia.

What’s more, as written knowledge in the living vernacular of the state became more specialized and more powerful, the illiterate were often unable to defend themselves legally. Native populations were in innumerable cases displaced from and dispossessed of their ancestral land holdings, simply because they could not produce a written deed. This not only happened in ancient empires but also continues to take place in modern (post-)colonial situations. Sometimes, knowledge really is power. When the powerless are reduced to statistics in the bureaucrat’s ledger, indirect rule, as was practiced for example by the British in India and China, becomes possible.

Clearly, Goody is ambivalent about labeling these kinds of long-term changes as progress. Civilizations truly gain a lot through writing, but they can lose just as much. Levi-Strauss, for one, saw the birth of writing as the beginning of man’s exploitation by man. Goody is definitely more optimistic, however, on the benefits of literacy. For him, reading “permits a greater distancing between individual, language, and reference than speech, a greater objectification which increases the analytical potential of the human mind.” (p.142) Of course, people can be the victims of an analytical mind as much as they can be the beneficiaries of one. In places where writing makes its debut, as in conquest scenarios like Norman England or colonial sub-Saharan Africa, a wholesale reorganization of both thought process and social organization can turn the world upside-down for many. So while Goody is clearly successful in locating “trends in the evolution of the organization of society,” he is equally certain that these long-term historical changes can not be labeled progress tout court.

If I were to criticize Goody, I would say that The Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society is a little too frozen in time, a little too orthodox. Jack Goody was a great historian of long-term changes in the means of communication. But in 1986, he had little to say about the post-literate world we seem to be headed towards. He dismissed the global village idea of McLuhan, yet he doesn’t take up McLuhan’s challenge and attempt to understand what happens to the message after the medium changes drastically. After reading Goody’s Logic of Writing and the Organization of Society, I feel I am left with many questions. Is social media a return from the written/read to the oral/aural? Or perhaps it is only a kind of adventure in the audio-visual universe? Does the fact that people carry phones/cameras and the internet with them at all times point to a world beyond the hegemony of paper, print, and book? Or is this proliferation of data points merely feeding the prerogatives of some new and unnoticed priests and mandarins of the state or economy? Are we becoming more or less of a statistic when we tether ourselves to a satellite in the cloud? It’s worthwhile to pose these questions, even if anthropology in its current state might still be unable to provide cogent answers.

In sum, if writing does not end oppression and justice but merely gives them what Goody called “another format,” then I have to ask: what formats of oppression and justice can we expect in the imminent post-literate but hyper-graphic age?

[John Fitzgerald · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super-interesting study. The author attempts to make a cross-disciplinary study of the differences between societies with and without writing. He talks about early uses of writing in religious practice, the economy, affairs of state, and law and cites examples from ancient and medieval societies. His models for societies without writing are somewhat necessarily limited, and further limited to his own experience in Western Africa. Possibly for that reason, he seems a little cautious about drawing conclusions on the influences of writing (or not writing). But overall and interesting and lucid study.

[Hamad T Alotaibi · Rating 2 out of 5]

العنوان جداً مهم و مفيد ولكن وللاسف احيان كثيره الترجمه بحذافيرها تعيق وصول المعنى للقارئ بالشكل الصحيح ، اكثر من نصف الكتب المترجمة للعربيه تعاني من هذة الاشكالية و هي عدم انسياق الكتاب بترجمته العربيه ، للامانه من اسواء التراجم للكتب اللي قرائتها في حياتي هي ترجمة هذا الكتاب و اتمنى المسؤلين في مشروع نقل المعارف ادراك ذالك قبل نفاذ الـ ٥٠ كتاب المقرر للطبع

[Akbar Madan · Rating 4 out of 5]

منطق الكتابة وتنظيم المجتمع

اصبحت الكتابة في المجتمعات الحديثة نوع من أنواع الفن الرفيع والمخملي ، تمارسه طبقة المثقفين ، بينما فعل الكتابة في تأصيله مختلف في المجتمعات الاولية ، ومن الصعب معرفة مستقبل الكتابة كفن أو ضرورة ثقافية متلازمة مع تطور المجتمعات بتطور أدواتها وآلياتها الثقافية ، فمع كل هذا الكم الهائل من التحديث في الادوات التي يمارسها إنسان القرن الواحد والعشرين تبقى الكتابة حاضرة وشاخصة في كل المشاهد الثقافية ، وعنصر مؤثر في حياة الانسان والمجتمعات البشرية .

الكتابة لا تزال مهد العلم رغم التحولات الالية التي طالت هذا الفعل " الكتابة " منذ الممارسة الاولى لها في الحضارة السومرية والفرعونية وبقية الحضارات وفِي شتى المجالات سواء السياسية المتعلق بالحكم وتفرعاته أو الممارسات الكهنوتية فيما يتعلق بالنذور وتنظيم المدخلات وأيضا القضاء فيما يتعلق بالعقود والاجراءات والمراسلات والخطابات ، الكتابة كان لها تلك التأثيرات المباشرة وغير المباشرة فمعرفة القراءة والكتابة أحدث التأثير القوي في تنظيم المجتمعات البشرية وكذلك ساهمت في تعديل التصورات المركزية سواء كانت الاوروبية المسيحية أو العربية الاسلامية أو غيرها من المركزيات في العالم حول الجماعات البشرية وتطورها .

هذا البعد الاجتماعي والانثربولوجي لعلم وتاريخ الكتابة يكشف عن مساهمات هذا الفعل في التغيرات الهيكلية في الثقافة والاجتماع والاقتصاد ، فضروب المكاتبة بكل اصنافها وانواعها رسمت خط تطور الكتابة عند الانسان وحاجته الفعلية لتلك الممارسة ، في شأن الكتابة نفسه يكتب الفيلسوف الفرنسي جاك دريدا " علم الكتابة " عن خلخلة النظام الداخلي للغة من خلال فعل التدوين " الكتابة " وهو ما يفسر بقاء بعض المجتمعات الشفهية التي تُمارس شفهية الكلام أو اللغة كنظام اتصال وتواصل يحافظ على نغمة الصوت الاصيل المتشكلة في بدايات الكائنات كلها ، كما ان بعض الاديان مارست الكتابة في مراحل متأخر من تكوينها الاجتماعي والسياسي خوفا من ان يكون التدوين " الكتابة " لعبة المدونين بتلاعب السياسي بالتاريخ والدين ، وقد حدث فعلا تلاعب وكان الخوف مبرر ، هكذا تكون الكتابة عند دريدا فعل خنق للغة عندما تأطرها وتسيّجها بسياج مُدبب ممزق لاوصال اللغة اذا ما ارادت الانفلات في الفضاء الكبير التي نشأت فيه .

سوف يكون الخنق مضاعفا اذا ما اتجهت المجتمعات الحديثة نحو ترميز اللغة ، كما هو واضح في الاستخدامات الرمزية الممارسة في قنوات التواصل الاجتماعي الحديثة ، هذا الترميز سوف يخنق على شفاهية وكتابية اللغة ، وليس بعيدا عن ذلك مقولة جان جاك روسو حو�� الكتابة حيث دعى في كتابه " إميل " الى الاعتناء بالقول مقابل الكتابة لان ممارس الكتابة متقاعس أمام الخيال والاحساس والعاطفة وهو سقوط في الفخ ، والكتابة نطق فاسد لانه ابعاد عن الفهم الواضح والصريح .

بالنتيجة لا تشكل بدايات فعل الكتابة الاهمية القصوى التي تشكله التأثيرات التي تحدثها الكتابة في تطور المجتمعات وتبدلاتها الثقافية والسياسية والاقتصادية ، تلك التغيرات لها ايضا التأثير نفسه على تطور الكتابة وقد يكون هذا التأثر بمستوى قتل لفعل الكتابة نفسه .

[Roger Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good idea, tepid execution.

[Mishari · Rating 1 out of 5]

‏هناك مشكلة في الترجمة لدى هيئة البحرين للثقافة ، وهي أن الترجمة تكاد تكون حرفية تمنع القارئ العادي من فهم ما يقرأ ، الوضع تحول لمحاولة فك طلاسم وألغاز !