Sir John Rankine Goody 1919–2015 was an English social anthropologist. He was the prominent lecturer at Cambridge University, and was William Wyse Professor of Social Anthropology from 1973 to 1984.
Among his leading publications were Death, property in addition to the ancestors 1962, Technology, Tradition, and the State in Africa 1971, The myth of the Bagre 1972 and The domestication of the savage mind 1977.
Inspired by LoWiili and LoDagaa peoples in northern Ghana, Goody increasingly turned to comparative study of Europe, Africa and Asia.
Between 1954 and 1984, he taught Luce Lectures at Yale University—Fall 1987.
Goody has pioneered the comparative anthropology of literacy, attempting to gauge the preconditions and effects of writing as a technology. He also published approximately the history of the variety and the anthropology of inheritance. More recently, he has solution on the anthropology of flowers and food.