Biography
Born on 27 July 1919, Goody grew up in Welwyn Garden City and St Albans, where he attended St Albans School . He went up to St John's College, Cambridge to study English Literature in 1938, where he came to know leftist intellectuals like Eric Hobsbawm.
Fighting in North Africa in World War II, he was captured by the Germans and spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camps.
Inspired by reading James George Frazer's Golden Bough and Gordon Childe, he transferred to Archaeology and Anthropology when he resumed university study in 1946. After fieldwork in Gonja in northern Ghana, Goody increasingly turned to comparative study of Europe, Africa and Asia.
Between 1954 and 1984, he taught social anthropology at Cambridge University, serving as the William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 until 1984. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1976 and has also has been knighted by the Queen. He gave the Luce Lectures at Yale University—Fall 1987.
Goody has pioneered the comparative anthropology 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.
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