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LoDagaa Fieldwork
Jack Goody's extended anthropological work among the LoDagaa of northern Ghana — the empirical foundation from which his entire framework of technologies of the intellect emerged.
Between 1950 and the late 1960s, Goody conducted extended fieldwork among the LoDagaa, a society in northern Ghana undergoing a transition from primarily oral to partially literate practice. Some members had received missionary or colonial education and could read and write; others could not. The differences between them were observable in real time rather than reconstructed from historical inference. Goody could watch what happened to cognitive practices when writing entered a community. The transition was not gradual and uniform. It was uneven, contested, and accompanied by changes in social organization, ritual practice, and knowledge transmission that Goody documented across decades of return visits and comparative analysis. The fieldwork produced the empirical basis for every subsequent claim Goody made about cognitive consequences of literacy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The LoDagaa fieldwork was distinctive in its attention to cognitive practices alongside social structure. Most anthropological work of the period focused on kinship, economics, ritual, and political organization. Goody attended to these but added systematic observation of