In her study of domestic organization in Gonja, a formerly important West African state, now part of Ghana, Esther Goody has concentrated on tracing the interrelationships between political and domestic institutions in a bilateral kinship system, untypical of the area. After outlining the problems which she is seeking to solve and describing the domestic, political and economic context of life in central Gonja, the author examines the several aspects of marriage fundamental to the establishment of domestic groups and their development. The practice of sending children to be reared by kin is...

Over the last twenty years, Esther Goody has made extensive studies of traditional and contemporary patterns of education and child-rearing in West Africa. In this book she provides an account of the rich variety of institutions, such as fostering, apprenticeship and wardship, which have developed in West Africa either in absence of, or alongside, formal schools, to prepare children for the wide range of economic and political roles now available to them in adult society. Drawing on her work in West Africa and with West Africans in London, Dr Goody shows that among many groups it is common...

There is a growing view that intelligence evolved as a product of social independence and that intelligence was linked to the use of spoken language. Taking as their starting-point the social production of intelligence and of language, scholars from a range of disciplines are beginning to rethink fundamental questions about human evolution, language and social institutions. In this volume, anthropologists, linguists, primatologists and pychologists come together to work on this new frontier of research.

The essays in this volume focus on two themes: the centrality of the production of and trade in cloth in the emergence of market activity; and the nature of the industrialization process.

These essays raise fundamental questions about the ways in which interrogative and politeness forms are used in day-to-day social interaction.