Jack Goody

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. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/