Jack Goody

Sir John Rankine Goody (27 July 1919 – 16 July 2015) was an English social anthropologist.

Born 27 July 1919, His parents were Harold Goody (1885–1969) and Lilian Rankine Goody (1885–1962).

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 met leftist intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm, Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson.

Goody left university to fight in World War II.

Following officer training, he was commissioned into the Sherwood Foresters (Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Regiment), British Army, on 23 March 1940 as a second lieutenant.

Fighting in North Africa, he was captured by the Germans and spent three years in prisoner-of-war camps.

At the end of the war he held the rank of lieutenant.

Following his release, he returned to Cambridge to continue his studies.

Inspired by James George Frazer's Golden Bough and the archaeologist V. Gordon Childe, he transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology when he resumed university study in 1946.

Meyer Fortes was his first mentor in Social Anthropology.

After fieldwork with the LoWiili and LoDagaa peoples in northern Ghana, Goody increasingly turned to comparative study of Europe, Africa and Asia.

He officially relinquished his commission on 19 January 1952.

Between 1954 and 1984, he taught social anthropology at Cambridge University, serving as the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 until 1984.

Among his main publications were Death, property and the ancestors (1962), Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa (1971), The myth of the Bagre (1972) and The domestication of the savage mind (1977).

He associated the beginnings of writing with the task of managing surplus and, in a paper with Ian Watt (Goody and Watt 1963), he advanced the argument that the rise of science and philosophy in classical Greece depended on the invention of the alphabet.

As these factors could be applied to any contemporary social system or to systematic changes over time, his work is equally relevant to many disciplines.

He was a prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984.

In 1976, Goody was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).

He was an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences.

He gave the Luce Lectures at Yale University—Fall 1987.

Goody has pioneered the comparative anthropology of literacy, attempting to gauge the preconditions and effects of writing as a technology.

He also published about the history of the family and the anthropology of inheritance.

More recently, he has written on the anthropology of flowers and food.

In the 2005 Queen's Birthday Honours, he was appointed a Knight Bachelor "for services to Social Anthropology", and therefore granted the use of the title sir.

In 2006, he was appointed Commandeur dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Republic.

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 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 urbanisation and growth of bureaucratic institutions that modified or overrode traditional forms of social organisation, such as family or tribe, identifying civilisation as "the culture of cities".

And third, he attached great weight to the technologies of communication as instruments of psychological and social change.

Goody died on 16 July 2015, aged 95.

His funeral was held on 29 July at the West Chapel, Cambridge City Crematorium.