Abstract
Goody's essay overlaps with his recent work on the “search for metals” and, more generally, with his many books expounding the commonalities of Eurasian history. His critique of Eurocentrism remains invaluable. This review article argues that his emphasis on diffusion can be usefully supplemented with a concept of civilization, to facilitate comparative structural analysis. Goody's perspective might also be enhanced by an engagement with the literature on “Axial Age” cosmologies and with substantivist economic anthropology. It is worth revisiting Karl Polanyi's efforts to grasp the position of the economy in society, in order to recover in the neoliberal present the long-run Eurasian dialectic between redistribution and market exchange.
Highlights
Forty years ago, after completing a one-year course called Certificate in Social Anthropology, I was admitted by Jack Goody to begin Ph.D. research in that discipline in the Cambridge department that he headed
Jack thought that anthropologists were getting a bit thick on the ground in Melanesia and encouraged me instead to stick with the area specialization which I already had in Eurasia
Goody did not explore how this Eurasian history played out in the political economy of particular civilizational constellations, or how these civilizations depended on their cosmologies and economic ideologies to keep the forces of trade, markets and commodities in their proper place
Summary
Jack Goody had no knowledge of this part of Europe, or of debates in other disciplines about central planning and totalitarianism Nor was he very interested in economic anthropology. When I first encountered him in the 1970s, Goody was busy developing new angles from which to contrast sub-Saharan Africa to Eurasia, the contrast that had emerged from his earliest field research in Ghana focusing on the intergenerational transmission of property (Goody 1962) He continued to address this binary in many later publications. Goody’s historical narrative emphasizing the diffusion of ideas and technologies across Eurasia deals well with the horizontal dimension, but I shall argue that it overlooks the vertical dimensions of societal change in the various civilizations of the landmass In developing these points I shall draw in particular on the substantivist economic anthropology of Karl Polanyi, a major figure neglected by Goody. Polanyi lacks Goody’s Eurasian breadth and balance, I shall suggest that his conceptual tools offer a complementary perspective on the originality of the “Eurasian miracle” in world history
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