Myth, Ritual, and the Oral

Jack Goody. Myth, Ritual, and the Oral. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 161 pp.

In Myth, Ritual, and the Oral Jack Goody provides a thought-provoking synthesizes of oral methodological problems and analytical approaches. With over five decades of experience and scholarship, Goody has spent a considerable amount of time on the topic, contributing to our understanding in influential books like The Myth of the Bagre (1972), The Domestication of the Savage Mind (1977), The Interface between the Written and the Oral (1987), and A Myth Revisited: The Third Bagre (2002) . These works, among others, are consolidated in this tightly packed social anthropological text. Although Goody states up front that he is not saying anything new in the book, the work offers a fresh, insightful, and cognitive approach on the subject. Goody argues that myth, ritual, and oral literature is a creative, imaginative, and variable process that is difficult to analyze.

Goody shows the entanglements, variability, and transformations associated with myths, ritual, and the oral. He begins by addressing the problem of defining religion and ritual by viewing "classical statements and offering reconciliation." In...