Reading :: The Domestication of the Savage Mind

The Domestication of the Savage Mind
By Jack Goody

I had some concerns about the title of this book, but these were quickly addressed: Goody takes issue with the primitive-advanced dichotomy that anthropologists and sociologists of the past have adopted, a dichotomy that has primed scholars to examine current relations aside from the social system in which they have developed (p.2). Along these lines, he critiques Levi-Strauss' The Savage Mind for its ahistorical unity (p.4) and urges us to think in terms of more specific criteria—with one starting point being the acquisition of language (p.9). 

He further charges that sociology and anthropology tend to neglect technical changes: Durkheim steered clear of material culture, while Weber moved emphasis from production to ideology (pp.10-11). Goody, on the other hand, locates differences not in the mind but in the mechanics of communicative acts (p.12). Specifically, he is interested in "non-speech uses of language in writing,"such as "tables, lists, formulae and recipes" (p.17). 

In Chapter 2, Goody takes up intellectual behavior in preliterate societies. For Durkheim, he notes, the highest intellectual activity was social (p.21); Durkheim was interested in "society" and wanted to attribute everything to it (p.22). 

In Chapter 3, Goody turns to literacy. He argues that culture is a series of communicative acts (p.37) and thus writing, specifically alphabetical literacy, give oral communication a more permanent form, allowing it to be scrutinized (p.37). This also allowed orthodoxy to become ascendant. 

Chapters 4 and 5 are about tables and lists, respectively. Unfortunately, we don't get deeply into either, at least in the sense I was expecting. He does argue that writing doesn't just duplicate speech, it changes the nature of language use (p.76). In particular, the list rarely appears in oral discourse (p.80). Goody identifies seven distinct senses of "list, " including retrospective (e.g., kings or events; p.80), plan (e.g., shopping list; p.80), and lexical (e.g., inventory; p.80). Lists are processed differently from oral speech or from other writing (p.81). The list "relies on discontinuity," "depends on physical placement," "can be read in different directions," "has a clear-cut beginning and a precise end," and "encourages the ordering of the items" (p.81). The boundaries in particular make categories more visible and abstract (p.81). Writing allows one to re-sort items by different criteria, and in comparison to highly contextualized oral information, it can be simplified and abstract (p.87). Writing, he says, sharpens categories but also questions the nature of the classes (p.102). 

Chapter 6 shifts to the question of formulas,. As with tables and lists, "the formalisation of writing flouts the flexibility of speech, and it does so in a manner that is both distorting and generative" (p.112). By "formulae," he means "fixed statements of relationships in abstract form" (p.112), and he means them broadly, in the sense of formalized types of communication such as epics. (We might put genre under this category as well; cf. p.120.) Among other things, Goody claims here that rhetoric relies on "the deliberate analysis ... that writing makes possible" (p.114), an argument that aligns with Olson's. Quoting Ong, Goody argues that rhetoric is an art developed by a literate culture to formalize oral communication skills that structure thought (p.116). 

Overall, I found this to be an exciting and generative read. Most of the ideas are not new to me, but Goody does a great job of drawing them together and relating them to anthropological and archaeological insights into writing. If you're interested in writing as it structures how we encounter and make sense of the world, definitely pick this book up.