Social Theorists
Jack Goody
Anthropology
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
Sir John Rankine Goody was an English social anthropologist, born in Hammersmith, London, in 1919. He held the William Wyse Professorship of Social Anthropology at Cambridge University from 1973 to 1984, having studied under Meyer Fortes and E. E. Evans-Pritchard. Goody pioneered the comparative anthropology of literacy, examining how writing as a technology reshapes societies, and argued that the rise of science and philosophy in classical Greece depended on the invention of the alphabet; he also analyzed social structure through the combined effects of intensive agriculture, urbanization and communication technology in works including Death, Property and the Ancestors (1962), Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa (1971) and The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1976 and knighted in 2005 for services to social anthropology. He died in Cambridge in 2015.
Facts
Birth YearSourced to the subject's own account Death YearSourced to the subject's own account BirthplaceSourced to the subject's own accountHammersmith, London, England 1 Death PlaceSourced to the subject's own account Defining ContributionSourced to the subject's own accountComparative anthropology of literacy and how writing as a technology reshapes society 1 Notable WorkSourced to the subject's own accountThe Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977) 1 Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Studied under E. E. Evans-Pritchard (and Meyer Fortes) at Cambridge.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.