A giant of British social anthropology, Jack Goody (1919 – 2015) laboured for sixty years to transcend the view that anthropology was the study of “other cultures”. He wanted to move it in the direction of a more sociological, postcolonial, comparative social science. The most important precondition for this science was the freeing of world history from centuries of Eurocentric bias. From his base in Cambridge, Goody’s influence and inspiration spread out internationally. In Germany, as a long-term adviser to the Max Planck Society, he played a key role in the establishment of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) in 1999. This volume presents twelve Goody Lectures delivered in Halle between 2011 and 2022, together with an unpublished lecture given in 2004 by Goody himself and biographical and bibliographical essays by the editors.