Jack Goody
English social anthropologist (1919–2015)
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Through World War II, Ghana and Cross-cultural studies
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).
Early life and education
Born on 27 July 1919, he was the son of 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.
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Military service
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.
He officially relinquished his commission on 19 January 1952.
Academic career
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.
Between 1954 and 1984, he taught social anthropology at Cambridge University, serving as the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 until 1984. 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.
Later life
Goody died on 16 July 2015, aged 95. His funeral was held on 29 July at the West Chapel, Cambridge City Crematorium.
Honours
In 1976, Goody was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA). He was an associate of the US National Academy of Sciences. 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.