The collections consists primarily of academic material pertaining to Goody’s professional life, including:
● Correspondence with colleagues
● Correspondence with publishers
● Administrative material
● Field notes and field recordings
● Archival reproductions
● Diaries and notebooks
● Loose-leaf notes, lectures, articles
● Reviews by Goody
● Reviews of Goody
● Offprints of papers by Goody and others
Personal correspondence and documentation also appear, as do a book-length and perhaps fictionalised war narrative, Goody’s war diary, and a typescript of his autobiography. Five boxes contain writings by or pertaining to Goody’s colleague J.A. Braimah; three boxes of papers towards a history of social anthropology contain correspondence with, and writings by, other colleagues, particularly Meyer Fortes.
Approximately half of the material relates to Goody’s research into Ghana, with particular attention paid to the Gonja, the LoDagaa and the Bagre myth. There are notes, archival indices, photographs, concordances, interviews, slides, survey data and sound recordings, as well as microfilms of material consulted in archives circa 1964.
There is also material on West Africa and on the continent more broadly, on the Mediterranean, on China, and on Gujarat, India.
In addition to these geographical groupings, there are files of notes, lectures, essays and suchlike on various subtopics (pertaining to Ghana and elsewhere). Some run to multiple boxes, and some fill only slim folders; in total these subtopics take up no more than 20% of the physical space of the collection, but in other respects they cover much ground. Among the many labels Goody chose are: beverages; class; domestication; drugs; economics (including the economics of slavery); family; flowers; folk tales; food; gender; hats; iconography; kalabule and African socialism; kinship; knowledge; limits; literacy; love and law; marriage; the mind; modernity; modes of production; monastic households; nature and culture; nudity; oral culture; politics/law/war; property; puritanism; religion; riots and rebellions; science; semiotics; senses and sensations; social evolution; sorcery; terror; thought; trade; travel; the week; widows; and the written word.
Creation dates range from the 1930s to the 2010s.