The Expansive Moment

Jack Goody’s new book explores the development of the discipline of social anthropology through its key practitioners and how far its concerns interacted with the political and ideological debate of the interwar years. It is a study of the different ideological and intellectual approaches adopted by the emerging subject of social anthropology and how far these views were incorporated into and defined by the structures and institutions in which they developed. But it is also an analysis of how far the subject was created by its own response to key issues of the time: colonialism - specifically Africa, anti-Semitism and communism. Goody’s approach is characteristically personal: Malinowski dominates the discussion, as well as Fortes, Radcliffe-Brown and Evans-Pritchard, and his own experience, gathered over a wide-ranging life of fieldwork informs the conclusion of the book.