Esther N. Goody – författare

In her study of domestic organization in Gonja, a formerly important West African state, now part of Ghana, Esther Goody has concentrated on tracing the interrelationships between political and domestic institutions in a bilateral kinship system, untypical of the area. After outlining the problems which she is seeking to solve and describing the domestic, political and economic context of life in central Gonja, the author examines the several aspects of marriage fundamental to the establishment of domestic groups and their development. The practice of sending children to be reared by kin is then discussed and is related to the strong ties binding kin together however far apart they may live. Dr Goody examines patterns of residence through time, and seeks to relate these to both the political context and the form taken by authority in the kin group. The study concludes with a comparison of the Gonja system with other bilateral and unilineal African kingdoms, and the book is completed by appendices presenting the statistical material gathered during research.

Over the last twenty years, Esther Goody has made extensive studies of traditional and contemporary patterns of education and child-rearing in West Africa. In this book she provides an account of the rich variety of institutions, such as fostering, apprenticeship and wardship, which have developed in West Africa either in absence of, or alongside, formal schools, to prepare children for the wide range of economic and political roles now available to them in adult society. Drawing on her work in West Africa and with West Africans in London, Dr Goody shows that among many groups it is common practice to send children to grow up away from home. As a cross-cultural study of a central kinship institution - parenthood - and of processes of change in adult role allocation, the book is of interest to social anthropologists, sociologists, educationalists and social psychologists.

The essays in this volume focus on two themes: the centrality of the production of and trade in cloth in the emergence of market activity; and the nature of the industrialization process. The core of the book is formed by four detailed ethnographic studies of the development and current organization of cloth production for the market, in different parts of the world: tailoring in Kano City, northern Nigeria (Pokrant); dyeing and weaving in Daboya, northern Ghana (Goody); 'fashion'- shirt production in Bombay, India (Swallow); and the manufacture of 'handmade' Harris tweed in the Hebrides (Ennew). Each study examines access to raw materials and to the market, relations of production, the investment of capital and the reproduction of the system. Individually, they raise such questions as the role of fashion, the effects of national economic policies and legislation, and factors related to the modification of traditional technologies.

These essays, by anthropologists and anthropological linguists, draw on material from speech communities in three continents to raise fundamental questions about the ways in which interrogative and politeness forms are used in day-to-day social interaction. The authors suggest that interrogative and politeness forms have universal features which make them efficient for certain strategies of interaction. Why should these strategies constantly recur? Here the focus shifts to the consideration of status and power, social roles and social distance. Esther Goody looks at the way in whichy the institutionalization of questioning allows only for speech acts consistent with status differences. Brown and Levinson claim that speech acts are potentially threatening to those being addressed, and that politeness forms have evolved as a mechanism for reducing such threats. They analyse the conditions under which politeness forms will be used and show that their findings are consistent with data drawn from India, Mexico and the US.

There is a growing view that intelligence evolved as a product of social interdependence. The unique development of human intelligence was probably linked to the use of spoken language, but language itself evolved in the context of social interaction, and in its development it has shaped - and been shaped by - social institutions. Taking as their starting-point the social production of intelligence and of language, scholars across a range of disciplines are beginning to rethink fundamental questions about human evolution, language and social institutions. This volume brings together anthropologists, linguists, primatologists and psychologists, all working on this new frontier of research.