Annual Goody Lecture Features Thomas Hylland Eriksen on the Competition between China and Western Europe and Its Consequences
On 24 June 2021 at 18:00, Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen will give the annual Goody Lecture of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (MPI). Titled “The Treadmill Paradox in Cultural History: Competitive global capitalism and the Anthropocene challenge”, his lecture takes off from Goody’s theories of alternating leadership between Western Europe and China. Eriksen will question contemporary evolutionist approaches in the context of intensifying economic competition and the catastrophic consequences it is having for humans and the global environment. Thomas Hylland Eriksen is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo and an External Scientific Member of the MPI.
The lecture will be held online, accessible via the following link: Goody Lecture 2021
Goody Lecture – a Tradition since 2011
Sir Jack Goody (1919-2015) began his career as an Africanist. His work as an ethnographer in northern Ghana led to major contributions to the comparative study of kinship, literacy and property transmission. In later decades he has pursued these and other themes historically with reference to Eurasia, in the process exposing the deep Eurocentrism that persists within much Western scholarship. Goody‘s understanding of the unity of Eurasia and his conception of anthropology as a truly comparative sociology have been central to the Department of Chris Hann since its foundation. Every year since 2011 we have marked this debt to Jack Goody with a public lecture named in his honour.
Click here for an archive of all the Goody Lectures to date.