ABSTRACT
In The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), Goody takes up and develops a thesis which he had originally outlined in a joint article with Watt (1963), and which was further elaborated in his edited collection Literacy in Traditional Societies (1968a). The Domestication was published in the year after Goody’s Production and Reproduction, and although the two volumes deal with quite different topics, their general inspiration is extremely close. In its barest outline the argument of the latter is that there is a causal relationship between the kind of agricultural technology (plough versus hoe) and the kind of inheritance rules present in a particular society, and between these inheritance rules and the forms of kinship and marriage. The Domestication of the Savage Mind assigns an equally prominent place to technology—‘the technology of the intellect’. It offers a view of human development in which literacy is the crucial variable with the potential for transforming social and mental life. The present paper provides a commentary on this view in the light of material on traditional Hindu India.
