Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society

4

Between East and West: Greek Catholic Icons and Cultural Boundaries

Chris Hann

Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Halle)

The cultural, in other words, is the social viewed from another perspective, not a distinct analytic entity.

—Goody (1992, p. 30)

Questions of comparison and contrast have always been central to Jack Goody’s work. His meticulous early analyses of the social organization of adjacent communities in Northern Ghana (e.g., 1956) were criticized by his colleague Edmund Leach (1961), who associated this level of microcom-parison with the methods that he denigrated as “butterfly collecting” (p. 3). This was hardly a fair comment on Goody, but perhaps it had some influence on the direction his work would take from the 1960s ...