This volume is intended for graduate students and academics in history, anthropology, psychology, sociology, and education, as well as academics and all others interested in pursuing the directions and implications of the work of Jack Goody. Following an introductory chapter, this collection is divided into two parts corresponding to two of Goody’s main research concerns. The first part, consisting of seven chapters by an equal number of distinguished authors, is topically devoted to “Historical anthropology: Kinship, inheritance, and the state.” The second part consists of seven chapters dedicated to the topic “Orality, literacy, and written culture” and is likely to be of more interest to readers of Language in Society. Both the Preface, “Technology and change” (pp. ix–xvii) by Olson and Cole and the first chapter by Rosaire Langlois, “An introduction to Jack Goody’s historical anthropology” (3–26), provide useful preparation for the following chapters. These authors liken Goody’s anthropology to emphases on evolution and comparison more typical of 19th-century evolutionary anthropologists like Tylor. They provide a useful overview of the diachronic development of Goody’s ideas, demonstrating how the dichotomy of topics is related to the progression of his research. His early research on agricultural societies began with an interest in surplus management and the orderly transmission of wealth via inheritance and the creation of social inequality. This coincides with the nucleation of populations in urban centers and the growth of bureaucratic institutions. Technologies of communication, especially scripts, appear initially as a means of managing resources but become instruments of more profound psychological and social changes in human societies.

Part II includes the following chapters: “Orality and politics” (177–88) by Geoffrey Hawthorn; “Writing and kinship in northern Ghana: From cowry payments to paper documents” (189–213) by Sarah Hawkins; “The writing of social organization and the literate situating of cognition” (215–39) by Charles Bazerman; “Dynamics of the emergence of sociocultural institutional practices” (241–64) by Esther N. Goody; “Not by words alone: Reclothing the ‘oral’” (265–87) by Ruth Finnegan; “The documentary tradition in mind and society” (289–304), and “Rethinking the Goody myth” 305-24) by Michael Cole and Jennifer Cole. In each of these chapters, the authors provide a critical perspective on some aspect of Goody’s scholarly contributions to the anthropological understanding of writing and other modes of communication. For example, in Finnegan’s appreciation of Goody’s contributions to understanding “oral” traditions, she first notes that his opposition of “literate” to “oral” drew attention to distinguishing properties of the latter. In addition, Goody’s detailed ethnography of the ritual transmission of Bagre myth provided a detailed account of how dramatic and sonic aspects of performance provide orality with a multidimensionality it was often denied in reduction to transcribed texts. The chapter by Cole & Cole provides a careful analysis of “the Goody myth” and details how the interdisciplinary nature of his research and its broad appeal to many disciplines made his work vulnerable to misinterpretation.

An excellent collection brimming with insightful observations, the volume also includes a complete bibliography of Jack Goody’s work.