ABSTRACT
To my mind, the most revealing summary of Jack Goody's intellectual motives is to be found in the preface to Production and Reproduction (1976), the book that launched the series of large-scale comparative investigations for which he is now best known. I take as the text for this article the opening paragraphs and closing sentence of that preface:
When I first took a berth on a boat to West Africa, I did not do so with the sole purpose of getting to know something about an African society or, more generally, the “savage mind.” I was certainly very involved with the problems of getting to know another culture, another way of looking at the world. But other concerns were present too. What I knew about the medieval literature and history of Europe whetted my appetite to learn more about pre-industrial societies, their beliefs as well as their economic and productive systems. A period in the eastern Mediterranean had extended these interests in time and in space.
Secondly, there was the immediate situation in which I found myself in West Africa. Events were moving fast in Ghana during the period I was first there and the Convention People's Party, to the Birifu branch of which I was inscribed, were well on their way to power. However it was not only the links between local “tribe” and national politics that concerned me, but the earlier links, with long-distance trade, with Islam, with neighbouring states. It was on these historical subjects that I wrote when I first returned, and it was these subjects, in a wider context, that I pursued when trying to ask what it was that writers meant when they used terms like feudal to describe African states.
How did the states and local communities in Ghana resemble and differ from those of Europe, Asia and the Middle East with which they were so often compared and contrasted? How could we best understand the differences between a village in the Italian Abruzzi and a settlement in Northern Ghana? What made people think the adjectives “tribal,” “primitive,” “savage” appropriate to one set of cultures and not to the other? Were there no better ways of assessing similarity and difference than by means of a pair of crude binary oppositions!
Thirdly, my interest in the Third World, in “other cultures,” had been stimulated by personal, political and social encounters in Africa and Europe during and after the Second World War. How could one bring a wider range of knowledge about these other societies to bear on an understanding of our own situation? How could we provide historical, sociological and humanistic studies generally with a more universalistic base, with a less European-centred framework?
To such very general questions, this book provides little by way of answers. What could? I introduce this personal note only by way of explaining an undertaking that may be thought to fall between a number of stools, those representing different academic fields of enquiry, different techniques of investigation and different ways of understanding.
[…]
It is time we tried to fit together the numerous detailed investigations of social life in different parts of the world with the larger speculations on the development of human culture, (pp. ix–x; italics added)
