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 鈥� 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 鈥渢he culture of cities鈥�. 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.
鈥淥r 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鈥攖he 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.鈥� --Jack Goody, 鈥淓volution and Communication: The Domestication of the Savage Mind鈥�
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 鈥榣ogic of writing鈥� 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 exploitation by man. Goody is definitely more optimistic, however, on the benefits of literacy. For him, reading 鈥減ermits a greater distancing between individual, language, and reference than speech, a greater objectification which increases the analytical potential of the human mind.鈥� (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 鈥渢rends in the evolution of the organization of society,鈥� 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鈥檛 take up McLuhan鈥檚 challenge and attempt to understand what happens to the message after the medium changes drastically. After reading Goody鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥渁nother format,鈥� then I have to ask: what formats of oppression and justice can we expect in the imminent post-literate but hyper-graphic age?
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.