Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society

Implications of the Work of Jack Goody

David R. Olson, Michael Cole, David R. Olson, Michael Cole

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134813056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Inspired by the seminal work of Jack Goody, a historical anthropologist specializing in the study of social structure and change, Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society gathers diverse perspectives of 20 distinguished historians, anthropologists, psychologists, and educators to address the role of technologies in social stability and change in traditional and modern societies. In this interdisciplinary text, scholars examine the ways in which local languages and cultural traditions, modes of production and communication, patterns of local knowledge and authority affect how people and cultures resist or accommodate demands for such change.With work from acclaimed contributors, this pioneering volume is the first analysis of the influence of Jack Goody. It provides a thorough look at the relations between societies of different practices, customs, and values, determining the mechanisms behind sociocultural stability and change. Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society 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 and influence of Jack Goody.

II

HISTORICAL ANTHROPOLOGY: KINSHIR INHERITANCE, AND THE STATE

2

Agrarian Civilization and Modern World Society

Keith Hart

Goldsmiths College London

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)

Here Goody tells us that ethnography, the aspiration to write about a people considered as a natural unit and studied intensively through fieldwork, never defined his intellectual horizons. His subject is historical comparison and beyond that the development of human culture. He deliberately sets himself at odds with his greatest contemporary, Claude Lévi-Strauss, as being uninterested in binary opposition between the modern and the primitive, “the savage mind.” Rather, he writes as an actor in a historical period, coming of age in the Second World War, encountering the eastern Mediterranean, escaping from a prison camp into the mountains of the Abruzzi, entering Africa at the decisive moment of its anticolonial revolution and in its epicenter, Ghana. With European empires collapsing everywhere (“events were moving fast”), he rejects the Eurocentric idea that the West is somehow special, looking instead for forms of knowledge that are more truly universal, better suited to the new world society launched by the war.

As a former student of English literature, he knows something about medieval European society and culture. He wants to connect a newly independent West Africa to the Islamic civilization he encountered briefly during the war. His subject will therefore be the comparison of preindustrial societies, both past and present, an ethnographically informed juxtaposition of Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, perhaps Asia more generally. Above all, this enquiry is an extension of his own personal experience, fueled by social interactions and political engagement. The ultimate historical question is whither human civilization, but the key to that lies in the similarities and divergence of regions that have shared an agrarian past. Only a series of books could begin to address this question, and the present volume is the first of them. It is worth recalling its title, Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain. The focus is on how human beings produce their livelihood within families and how this influences their attempts to project themselves into the future.

Technology, Tradition and the State in Africa (Goody, 1971) could be said to have been the trailer for this enterprise, just as the publication of The East in the West (Goody, 1996), 20 years and almost a dozen books later, represents its partial culmination. The autobiographical memoir that Jack Goody wrote for Annual Review of Anthropology (1991) is a more elaborate document, specifically tying together his achievements as an ethnographer and as a comparative historian through Death, Property and the Ancestors (Goody, 1962), which remains the key volume of his oeuvre. The three themes of the title— how we seek to transcend death materially and spiritually—come together in Goody’s main preoccupation, with writing itself, the form of production in which he has himself engaged so persistently.

The time from the Second World War to the millennium was an extraordinary one, being the period when humanity formed a society, a single interactive network, for the first time. This was the cosmopolitan society that Kant (1970) envisaged two centuries earlier but did not witness. It was massively unequal and riddled with conflict, but now at last there was a universe of communications to give concrete expression to universal ideas. In the next century anthropologists will want to study this emerging human society, and they will look to us for antecedents. They will mostly be disappointed by the fragmented narrowness of our anthropological vision, because we have been slow to emancipate ourselves from the ethnographic project of studying exotic cultures conceived of in isolation. In this essay, I argue that Jack Goody, alone among his contemporaries, devised and carried out an anthropological project on a scale adequate to the world society being formed in his day. The preface reproduced earlier indicates why this should have been so. Here I take the project further than his modesty has allowed him to pursue in print. I ask, how does Goody’s project of historical comparison, especially the principal books of 1976–1998, illuminate the world society emerging in our time? What is his anthropological vision of the development of human culture, past, present, and future? This will inevitably be a product as much of my imagination as his, but reproduction was always so.

THE FORMATION OF WORLD SOCIETY 1945–2000

As late as 1950, some New Guinea Highlanders thought that they were the only people in the world. Mutual ignorance is still commonplace, but social isolation of this kind has ended. The period 1914–1945 has been described as a second Thirty Years War: two world wars separated by economic catastrophe and inhuman politics. Economy and society were still more national than international at this time. The space between nations was filled by war. The European empires were fatally undermined by the war, as Asia moved toward independence immediately afterward, with Africa following a decade later. Having granted Stalin the European territory he wanted in return for destroying Hitler’s armies, Roosevelt’s vision of an integrated world economy led by America through the United Nations was soon put into practice. At home, the leading industrial nations installed more effective welfare states, and this coordinated public investment fueled the long economic boom of the 1950s and 1960s. At the same time the rivalry between America and Russia led to the nuclear nightmare of the Cold War interspersed with not-so-little hot wars in Korea, Vietnam, and almost in Cuba.

The Vietnam War broke up the international currency system, forcing the United States off the gold standard and ushering in wild exchange rate fluctuations that triggered the invention of money futures and with them the global money markets we know today. The OPEC oil price rise deflated the Western economies and set in train a spiral of Third World debt. Ever since the 1970s, the world economy has been at the same time more integrated as a circuit of capital, increasingly polarized between rich and poor countries and in broad terms stagnant. But human society and demography were irreversibly transformed in the half century following the war.

World population doubled between 1960 and 2000 (from 3 billion to 6 billion). Countries like France, Japan, and Italy were still half peasant in 1945, but by the millennium agriculture accounted for less than 10% of the workforce in most of the industrial countries. The proportion of the global population living in cities rose from 1 in 40 in 1800 to around 50% in 2000, most of the increase after 1945 taking place in the poor countries. Food production was fully mechanized for the first time, and most of the world now ate the produce of a few heavily subsidized Western farmers. By the end of the century half of the 100 largest economic units on the planet were business corporations, 35 of whom had an annual turnover ($30–50 billion) greater than the GNP of all but 8 countries. If the world became a single interactive network in this period, it was mainly as a network of markets on which everyone’s livelihood now depended in some degree.

There were more international migrants before the First World War than at the end of the 20th-century. But the gross discrepancy between economic opportunities in the rich and poor countries has led to a new, more cosmopolitan mixture of peoples in the main cities of the West. A transport revolution built on the car and the airplane gave people everywhere a restless mobility. Even more striking was a communications revolution culminating during the 1990s in the digital convergence of three technologies—telephones, television, and computers. This revolution’s great symbol is the rise of the Internet, the net’ work of networks, but equally important for the development of a shared human consciousness is the size of global TV audiences, 23 billion for some major sporting events (more people watching the same thing than were alive in 1945!). Above all, this was the time that we saw the earth from the outside for the first time, having discovered space travel.

At the same time as we all participate in these developments, disparities of life experience on the planet remain vast. The rich countries, the OECD club that includes North America, Western Europe, and Japan, accounts for about 15% of the world’s population. The rest must reconcile their relative poverty with an unfinished history of racism, a hangover from 19th-century imperialism when Westerners used their new machines to take over the globe. Over one third of humanity still works in the fields with their hands; a similar number have never made a phone call in their life. Africa stands out as both the symbol and reality of this contrast. When the Europeans divided it between themselves not much more than a century ago, Africa had very few people compared with any region of similar size; a minute proportion of its inhabitants lived in cities. The products of its agriculture and mines were then indispensable to Western manufactures. Today over half of its people live in cities and African migrants overcome routine obstacles to move freely around the globe, but production there is only lightly mechanized, and the continent is less securely integrated into the world economy than in 1900.

At the same time, identification of modern capitalism with the West, specifically with the economic leadership of first Britain and then Germany and the United States, has been undermined by the rise of Asian economies in the second half of the 20th-century. In the 1980s and since, American and European dominance has been challenged by Japan, followed by the Southeast Asian tigers (newly industrialized countries), with China and India lumbering into high gear behind. Asia has long been where the majority of human beings live, and now much of manufacturing production is being relocated there. Here, only two centuries after the first stirrings of machine revolution, is a profound test for the assumption that the world’s future lies with capitalism’s pioneers, even as Africa’s exclusion from mainstream development seems more profound than ever.

It is possible to minimize the epoch-making significance of these changes, to claim that globalization is centuries old, nothing new. It is largely a question of quantity being transformed into quality, and perhaps judgment is inevitably subjective in these matters. I do not claim that the formation of world society has been completed in our time nor that it lacked antecedents, but I would ask readers to think of what the human condition was like before the Second World War and what it is now. Something tremendous has happened in between. Humanity has been brought closer together in dramatic ways and, if anything, has become more unequal. We have difficulty imagining the processes involved, not least because of the grip of a national consciousness fed by our own country’s news every day, leaving the rest a blur. Anthropologists, too, in sticking with their ethnographic method, have not risen to the challenge of documenting this huge shift in civilization. Instead we have continued to parrot the nationalist ideology of Versailles—that all cultures are entitled to their differences, however barbaric.

Jack Goody could not settle for just getting to know another culture. In reaching for a more universal conception of human history, he knew that he was doing so as an active participant in the making of a new world. But, even as he inserted himself into contemporary society, he chose to step back from the modern age. By focusing on preindustrial societies in Europe, Asia, and Africa, he left out any direct consideration of two centuries of machine revolution, the capitalist world economy, the New World in its entirety. But his topic is nevertheless the development of human culture and, as I show, his inquiries do reflect a consistent position on the ...