Don’t Kill Your Ancestors! Jack Goody, Ernest Gellner and the Vortex of Decolonisation
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.46585/cargo.2025.2.182Keywords:
Cambridge, comparison, decolonisation, Ernest Gellner, Jack Goody, positivism, structural functionalismAbstract
With debates about decolonising curricula and research practices in socio-cultural anthropology continuing vigorously, this paper argues for caution. The decolonisation movement is the culmination of appeals for rupture that devalue the contributions of those who worked within earlier paradigms. In Britain, the loose paradigm known as structural functionalism, which claimed the mantle of science on the basis of comparative methods, has long been discredited. Sometimes the critique is specific and personal (individual anthropologists are faulted for imperialist bias or the unfair appropriation of local knowledge). Sometimes the critique is oblique: the oeuvre of distinguished predecessors can be set to one side because, according to the standards of the 2020s, they failed to address the injustices of the colonial era that formed them. This paper explores and rejects both types of critique with respect to Jack Goody and Ernest Gellner, major figures in the Cambridge department of social anthropology in the last century who began their careers in the colonial era. It is argued with reference to their biographies, substantive contributions, and epistemologies that both upheld conventions of a cumulative science to which the discipline might one day return. Both Goody and Gellner wanted to push social anthropology beyond the ethnographic documentation of cultural diversity in the direction of a comparative historical social science. This agenda for the discipline has been thwarted by the dominance of culturalist approaches that pay little heed to history and depend on weighty but transient theoretical frames, all against the backdrop of decolonial handwringing.
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