The Power of the Written Tradition

In this collection of nine essays, noted anthropologist Jack Goody explores his view of writing as a transforming technology, charting the differences between cultures with writing and those without in such practices as historical record keeping, religious ceremony, and the telling of time. He describes how one version of a ritual — the Bagre of the loDagaa of northern Ghana — assumed primacy over other versions when it was written down, and he shows that as societies acquired writing, verbatim memorization rather than face-to-face interaction became a mainstay of education.