Death, Property, and the Ancestors: A Reconsideration of Goody's Concepts

Abstract

IntroductionDr. Jack Goody, in his study of Death, Property, and the Ancestors among the LoDagaa of Northern Ghana, shifts his level of analysis from time to time. On the one hand, in analysing the pattern of sacrifice to the ancestors (i.e. the relationship of donor to recipient in the sacrificial situation), among the two communities of the LoWiili and LoDagaba (collectively referred to as the LoDagaa), he maintains that the crucial variable is the locus of tension in the holder-heir relationship, and the consequent guilt a man feels since he can only inherit the property on the holder's death. Thus individuals sacrifice to those people from whom they also inherit. We are told that sacrifice follows the pattern of inheritance of movable property, which in the case of the LoWiili falls within the patriclan and in the case of the LoDagaba falls within the matriclan. Goody makes much of this holder-heir relationship but does not follow up the implications in his analysis of the cases of sacrifice which he records in Table 12 on p. 398. Rather he shifts his level of analysis and relates the relationship between donor and recipient to the more diffuse level of the relationship existing between members of the corporate descent group, treating all members for these purposes as holders or heirs. In this sense the sacrificial obligations of the heirs are dependent on the continuing interest of the deceased members, together with their rightful expectation to a part of the property which is held by the living members of the corporate descent group in which movable property is inherited. A situation which arises because the descent group is conceived of as being made up of the living and certain dead members, i.e. the ancestors. In the most general sense Goody is maintaining that individuals sacrifice the sacrificial object (cows, goats) to those categories of people from whom they did in fact inherit, or might have inherited, these same objects of sacrifice.