Ill Met in Ghana

In recent years, Sir Jack Goody has published a series of essays (2002, 2003, 2004, 2006: 154—79) criticizing Norbert Elias’s theory of ‘civilizing processes’. In all of them, Goody — himself a West African specialist — makes clear that his disagreement with Elias dates back to their acquaintance in Ghana. The date is highly significant for it is unlikely that Goody’s opinions of Elias’s ideas were initially formed by his reading of Elias’s publications. There were also important differences between them in their approaches to theories of long-term social development. Despite appearances to the contrary, Elias and Goody have in fact much in common intellectually. Goody is one of the most historically orientated of anthropologists, and many points of contact with Elias are evident in his work on literacy (1968, 1987), food (1982), or The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977). Both swam against the ahistorical current of their respective disciplines and both rejected the old notion of ‘progress’. Elias’s fault is that occasionally his formulations may appear to give the opposite impression. Goody’s fault, perhaps, is that — in spite of his own historical perspective — under any model of a structured process he suspects there lurks a vision of progress and of European superiority.