Goody has pioneered the comparative anthropology of literacy of literacy, attempting to gauge the causal preconditions and effects of writing as a technology. He also wrote substantially on the history of the family and the anthropology of inheritance. More recently, he has written on the anthropology of flowers and food.
Works
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 ? 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 ?the culture of cities?. 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.
1976 [Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols are Connected. An Introduction to the Use of Structuralist Analysis in Social Anthropology http://books.google.com/books?id=npx_mKKJo88C] Cambridge University Press ISBN 052129052X
1977 The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1977); translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Turkish.
1957 Fields of Social Control Among the LoDagaba The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 87, No. 1 (Jan. - Jun., 1957), pp. 75-104 doi:10.2307/2843972
GOODY, J. 1959. The Mother's Brother and the Sister's Son in West Africa. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 89:61-88 response
1977 Ethnology and/or Cultural Anthropology in Italy: Traditions and Developments [and Comments and Reply] Vinigi Grottanelli, Giorgio Ausenda, Bernardo Bernardi, Ugo Bianchi, Y. Michal Bodemann, Jack Goody, Allison Jablonko, David I. Kertzer, Vittorio Lanternari, Antonio Marazzi, Roy A. Miller, Jr., Laura Laurencich Minelli, David M. Moss, Leonard W. Moss, H. R. H. Prince Peter of Greece and Denmark, Diana Pinto, Pietro Scotti, Tullio Tentori. Current Anthropology, Vol. 18, No. 4 (Dec., 1977), pp. 593-614
1989 Futures of the Family in Rural Africa Population and Development Review, Vol. 15, Supplement: Rural Development and Population: Institutions and Policy (1989), pp. 119-144 doi:10.2307/2807924
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