Chris Hann and Han F. Vermeulen (eds.)
Jack Goody between Social Anthropology and World History

23 JAN 2025 | 16:00–17:30
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology,
Advokatenweg 36, 06114 Halle (Saale), Germany
www.eth.mpg.de

To mark publication of the 50th and final volume in the series “Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia”.

A giant of British social anthropology, Jack Goody (1919–2015) laboured for sixty years to transcend the view that anthropology was the study of “other cultures”. He wanted to move it in the direction of a more sociological, postcolonial, comparative social science. The most important precondition for this science was the freeing of world history from centuries of Eurocentric bias. From his base in Cambridge, Goody’s influence and inspiration spread out internationally. In Germany, as a long-term adviser to the Max Planck Society, he played a key role in the establishment of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) in 1999. This volume presents twelve Goody Lectures delivered in Halle between 2011 and 2022, together with an unpublished lecture given in 2004 by Goody himself and biographical and bibliographical essays by the editors.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I Jack Goody in Halle, 2004

1. Jack Goody: Europe: the wider Eurasian picture 

Part II The Goody Lectures in Halle, 2011–2022

1. Keith Hart:Jack Goody’s Vision of World History and African Development Today (2011)
   
2. Peter Burke: A Case of Cultural Hybridity: the European Renaissance (2012)
   
3. Martha Mundy: The Solace of the Past in the Unspeakable Present: the historical anthropology of the ‘Near East’ (2013)
   
4. Francesca Bray: Rice as Self: food, history and nation-building in Japan and Malaysia (2014)
   
5. David Wengrow: Cities before the State in Early Eurasia (2015)
   
6. Martine Segalen: On Papies and Mammies: the invention of a new relative in contemporary European kinship (2016)
   
7. Nur Yalman: On Cultural Revolutions: observations on myth and history in Turkey (2017)
   
8. Sylvia Yanagisako: Accumulating Family Values (2018)
   
9. Carola Lentz: Class and Power in a Stateless Society: revisiting Jack Goody’s ethnography of the LoDagaa (Ghana) (2019)
   
10. Stephen C. Levinson: On ‘Technologies of the Intellect’ (2020)
    
11. Thomas Hylland Eriksen: The Treadmill Paradox in the Anthropocene: unintentional consequences of competition under runaway globalization (2021)
    
12. Chris Hann: Colonial Encounters: from Caliban and Owain Glyndŵr to Ilham Tohti and Petra Köpping (2022) 

Part III Biographical and Bibliographical Approaches

1. Chris Hann: John Rankine Goody, 1919–2015
2. Han F. Vermeulen: Expanding Interests: Jack Goody’s scholarship from ethnography and social anthropology to comparative sociology and world history
   
3. Han F. Vermeulen: Bibliography of John Rankine Goody, 1919–2015 

Adam Crothers: Appendix: Jack Goody’s Papers at St. John’s College Library: scope and current state