Goody/What's in a List?

Originally published in 1977’s The Domestication of the Savage Mind and reprinted here in 2001, “What’s in a List?” by Cambridge University social anthropologist Jack Goody furthers his theory that the technology of writing spurred psychological and social transformations in humankind.

By analyzing the genre of the list, Goody shows how writing influenced cognitive operations in literate cultures over time. Goody chooses the list because the genre appears in proto-alphabetic societies that predate his earlier work on the Greek alphabet, so his purpose seems partially to add validity to a previous argument by expanding the work further back in time. After presenting this raison de idée, Goody defines the list.

The list reflects the transformation from graphic representation to the symbolic representation that writing sparks. The list is a genre of “discontinuity” that relies on a physical space where the content can be read in multiple directions but within a bounded frame. Lists connect words not in the “linear fashion” of a rhetorical situation, but as small units composed of “words, concepts, morphemes, lexical units, and phrases.” Lists in particular embody the type of order that writing brings to words, and lists both over-generalize and add abstraction to words since they encourage the construction of new meanings that words might not have had as part of a larger speech context. The decontextualization a list epitomizes shows that writing gives the human mind “a special kind of lever on ‘reality’” (49). Writing is not just a mnemonic skill but also a technology that affords its users the capacity for what Goody calls “linguistic recoding.”

Numerous examples shore up Goody’s thesis, which is most lucid in its restating on p. 46. He looks at the administrative lists of the “redistributive” economies of Mesopotamia, Phoenician-Hebrew, and Egyptian societies to show how lists create a physical space to store ideas in a general way. Another type of list he analyzes is the event list, which he claims were forms of early historical writing in proto-alphabetic societies (40). The lexical lists of Sumeria and Egypt are another sub-genre that Goody explores, and he believes this type of list indicates a venture into mind exercise or “play” where “increments of knowledge” lead to ordering human experience and preserving dying or dead languages.

I never thought of lists as serving such a high communicative function, so I found Goody’s ideas evocative. However, the structure of Goody’s essay itself was hard to follow. His argument is dense on the front end with many examples and clearest toward the end (46-47), spurring much re-reading. His thesis seemed stronger later in the essay than at its first offering, which is perhaps a rhetorical strategy of the anthropological paper/article that makes for a more climactic ending after presenting all that research from the field.

Goody ends with a somewhat surprising appeal that the list be used as a way to educate oral cultures. While he doesn’t explicitly call these oral societies “primitive,” he does allude to cultures that communicate primarily in an oral fashion as members of a tribe or part of the “natural” world. Though I might be over-stretching here, I almost sensed a hint of elitism—where the various literate list-makers lie polemically opposed to cultures of orality. Though other parts of the essay denounce anthropological racism, Goody still seems to set up oral cultures at “the Other.” I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume his approach is simply comparative and his call to action at the end was perhaps in line with I.A. Richards’ approach that effective communication could alleviate social problems. Another connection to this piece I saw was in Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” where he uses the genre of list as an example of how interpretation affects meaning (1027).