Malinowski, Bronislaw

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), founder of British social anthropology and first thorough-going practitioner (if not the inventor) of the fieldwork method known as "participant observation," continues to be read with fascination and admiration. His reputation rests on six classic monographs he wrote between 1922 and 1935 about the lives and ideas of the world of the people of the Trobriands, a group of islands off the northeast coast of Papua New Guinea.

Malinowski was born in Cracow in 1884 to aristocratic parents. His father -- a linguist and professor of Slavic philology at the University of Cracow -- died when he was 12. His evidently clever mother taught herself Latin and mathematics in order to tutor him during a long illness in his mid-teens. In 1902 he entered the University of Cracow to study physics and philosophy and graduated with a Ph.D. in 1908 -- his thesis influenced by the empiricist epistemology of Ernst Mach. Afterward, at Leipzig, he studied economic history with Bucher and psychology with WUNDT, whose "folk psychology" concerned people's day-to-day ideas and their interconnections -- their language, customs, art, myths, religion -- in short, their "culture." Frazer's The Golden Bough was another definitive influence (see Kuper 1996: 1-34; Stocking 1995: 244 - 297).

In 1910 Malinowski left Leipzig for the London School of Economics where, under Westermarck, he worked on The Family among the Australian Aborigines, published in 1913. In 1914, aged 30, he made his first field trip to Papua New Guinea, where, following the wishes of his mentor, W. H. R. Rivers, he worked for some months among the Mailu; but this was "no more than an apprentice's trial run, conventional enough in method and results" (Kuper 1966: 12). The ground-breaking fieldwork came in 1915-1916 and 1917 - 1918 in Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands.

Malinowski's first Trobriand ethnography was written in Australia in 1916. Baloma: The Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands (1916) is an engaging study of magic, witchcraft, and religious beliefs that also reveals Malinowski's tenacity in investigation. Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) describes the ceremonial exchange known as the Kula; a key text for anthropologists, it influenced, for example, Marcel Mauss and Claude LÉVI-STRAUSS. Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926) examines reciprocity as an underlying principle of social control. Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) looks at the implications for Freudian theory of relations within the Trobriand family. The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) focuses on sexuality, marriage, and kinship and includes vivid descriptions of children's daily lives. Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935, two volumes) deals with horticulture, land tenure, and the language of magic and gardening. Here Malinowski draws out his idea of "the context of situation," first put forward in an essay published twelve years earlier: "The conception of meaning as contained in an utterance is false and futile. A statement, spoken in real life, is never detached from the situation in which it has been uttered" (1952: 307). This perspective on language -- radical in its time -- is consistent with Malinowski's empiricism, which was always tempered by an awareness that "any belief or any item of folklore is not a simple piece of information . . . [it] must be examined in the light of diverse types of minds and of the diverse institutions in which it can be traced. To ignore this social dimension [of belief] . . . is unscientific" (1974: 239-240).

Malinowski's evolutionist view took for granted the cultural superiority of Europeans over other peoples; this idea is evident in his various works, especially in his private Trobriand diaries, which, being somewhat at odds with the ethnographies, caused controversy when they were published posthumously in 1967. Even so, and despite his sometimes patronizing and even spiteful asides on "the natives," Malinowski was clearly genuine both in his pursuit of his fieldwork aims and in the often admiring respect for Trobriand people he expressed in his works and in person to his students (Firth 1957, 1989; Young 1979).

A charismatic teacher, revered by his students at the London School of Economics, where he held the first chair in social anthropology, Malinowski spent a good deal of his intellectual force engaged in the battle to make his functionalist theory of human behavior dominant in social anthropology. He argued that "culture is essentially an instrumental apparatus by which man is put in a position the better to cope with the concrete specific problems that face him in his environment in the course of the satisfaction of his needs" (1944: 150). This perspective had stood Malinowski in good stead in gathering field data, but it assumed "culture" to be an integrated whole, left no place for change as a condition of human existence, and lacked any analytical power to explain cross-cultural similarities and differences.

In 1938 Malinowski went to the United States, where he was caught by the outbreak of World War II and remained, as a visiting professor at Yale, until he died suddenly in 1942. His work was developed and sometimes amended by later ethnographers of the Trobriands, but "the legacy of his Trobriand ethnography continues to play an unprecedented role in the history of anthropology" (Weiner 1988: 4).

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Argonauts of the Western Pacific

-- Christina Toren

References

Firth, R., Ed. (1957). Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Firth, R. (1989). Introduction. In B. Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Stanford University Press.

Kuper, A. (1996). Anthropologists and Anthropology: The Modern British School. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.

Malinowski, B. (1916). Baloma: Spirits of the dead in the Trobriand Islands. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 46:354-430.

Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.

Malinowski, B. (1926). Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Kegan Paul.

Malinowski, B. (1927). Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Kegan Paul.

Malinowski, B. (1929). The Sexual Life of Savages. London: Routledge.

Malinowski, B. (1935). Coral Gardens and their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. Two vols. London: George Allen and Unwin.

Malinowski, B. (1944). A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Malinowski, B. (1952). The problem of meaning in primitive languages. In C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Eds., The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Malinowski, B. (1974). Magic, Science and Religion. London: Souvenir Press.

Malinowski, B. (1967). A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Stocking, G. W. (1995). After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1888-1951. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Weiner, A. (1988). The Trobrianders of Papua New Guinea. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.

Young, M. W., Ed. (1979). The Ethnography of Malinowski: The Trobriand Islands 1915-18. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Malinowski, Bronislaw

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Further Readings