Jack Goody

In *The Domestication of the Savage Mind* (1977), Goody argued that the shift from oral to written cultures fundamentally restructured human cognition and social organization. Drawing on ideas from scholars like Marshall McLuhan and A.R. Luria, he contended that writing enabled new forms of logical analysis, classification, and skepticism that were less accessible in purely oral traditions.

Goody's literacy thesis proposed a fundamental distinction between oral and literate societies in terms of cognitive and social organization. This attracted significant debate, with critics like Brian Street arguing in *Literacy in Theory and Practice* (1984) that Goody overstated the cognitive differences and underplayed how literacy practices vary within and across societies.

Goody conducted ethnographic fieldwork primarily among the LoDagaa and Gonja peoples of northern Ghana, beginning in the late 1940s. His West African research informed his later comparative studies of kinship, marriage, inheritance, and the social consequences of literacy across African and Eurasian societies.

In *The East in the West* (1996), Goody challenged the notion that European rationality and capitalism represented fundamentally unique developments. He argued that many supposedly Western achievements — including rational thought, mercantile capitalism, and individualism — had parallels in Asian and Middle Eastern civilizations, pushing back against the Eurocentric assumptions of earlier scholars like Max Weber.