As a historiographic source, The hidden economy of kinship sheds great light on the de facto life of European families beyond the dominant de juro Church doctrine. In discussing how norms of the Church were variously resisted, modified, or altogether avoided, Goody provides us with a detailed and textured understanding of local variations and contestation in social life in Europe beyond a homogenous Christian ekumene. What I found particularly striking about the forms of resistance discussed is that they can occur at both ends of society, among both the ruling nobles and the peasants
My issue with Goody’s analysis is that it rests on a somewhat simplistic understanding of power, values, and ideology. The Church is presented as a monolithic imposer of doctrine which runs counter to the values or interest of the populace; the populace responds by through accommodation, dissemble, or disregard. Little room is left for possibility of fluidity in interpretation or of mutual . The Church did not emerge in a “cultural vacuum;” rather, its members shared their origins with the selfsame “newly Christian” populations upon which it sought to “impose its rules.” In this sense, I would suspect that there was much more regional variation in how and when Churches sought reshape lay behavior, beyond uniform pan-European ecclesiastical principle. Likewise, Goody seems to pose a mutual exclusivity between what Scott would call the “public transcripts” of the Church and the “hidden transcripts” of the populace, which does not account for how for Church ideology could have been mediated by, incorporated into, or existed side by side with lay beliefs. Ultimately, Goody’s analysis is contingent on a specific ontology of the subject as preexisting ideology, rather than dialogically constituted by it. (For a similar critique see Susan Gal’s article “Language and the "Arts of Resistance" Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 10, No. 3, (Aug., 1995), pp. 407-424)
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