ABSTRACT
Jack Goody's work has shown how social structure, technology, and individual experience shape and reshape institutional forms. Because he tracks these changes over time, some critics have charged him with being an evolutionist and a determinist. Yet his work has never been about evolution in the old-fashioned sense of necessary mechanistic progress along some path toward higher social forms. Indeed, he and Keith Hart held a lively seminar at Cambridge looking at cases, including Greece, Rome, and Mesoamerica, where societies dramatically declined. Rather, he has been concerned with how technological innovation shapes specific social forms: first, through the body of work on how plow agriculture transformed reproductive strategies, inheritance, and kinship patterns (e.g., Goody, 1976) and, second, through the corpus of work on literacy both as a tool for thinking and as a tool for shaping bureaucracies (Goody, 1977, 1986, 1987). “Civilization” is seen as the outcome not of some necessary evolutionary process but of the gradual cumulative effects of the interplay of many specific processes.
