MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW

MALINOWSKI, BRONISLAW (1884–1942), Polish-English social anthropologist. Born into an educated and aristocratic family, Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski received his Ph.D. in physics and mathematics from the Jagiellonian University of his native Cracow in 1908. Switching from the natural sciences to the human sciences, he entered the London School of Economics in 1910 and received a D.Sc. in 1916. He later traced his decision to study anthropology to his reading of James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough. The tribute was apt, for Malinowski became the leading British anthropologist of the generation following Frazer's, but also ironic, for no one did more to repudiate Frazer's method.

Malinowski's first contact with primitive society came during five months among the Mailu of Toulon Island off the southern coast of New Guinea in 1914–1915. In June 1915 he began the first of two extended periods of observation on the Trobriand Islands, to the east of New Guinea. Although colored by personal stress and ambivalence toward the natives, his twenty-one months in the Trobriands shaped his entire career. He became the apostle and exemplar of a new standard of anthropological fieldwork: ethnography must rely, he believed, on the participation of the ethnographer in the society under observation, rather than on the reports of travelers, missionaries, and hasty surveys. His fieldwork completed, Malinowski married Elsie Masson, daughter of a Melbourne chemistry professor. He began teaching at the London School of Economics after completing the manuscript of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), the first of his many books on the Trobriands. In 1927 he became the first professor of anthropology at the University of London.

Malinowski's approach to anthropology was psychological, but not psychoanalytic. His most celebrated work among nonspecialists was probably Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), in which he denies Sigmund Freud's claim that the Oedipus complex is universal. In this book Malinowski argues that among the Trobriand Islanders matrilineal descent (reinforced by ignorance of physiological paternity) diverted a boy's hostility from his father to the distant authority figure of his maternal uncle. Trobriand men repressed sexual desire for their sisters, not their mothers. Malinowski rejects Freud's claim in Totem and Taboo (1913) that an original Oedipal "crime" had established human culture: Freud's Lamarckian group psychology is simply wrong, Malinowski argues, and any other means of perpetuating the memory of the act requires the preexistence of culture.

Malinowski's attack on Freud reflected no personal reluctance to generalize; he had none of the methodological caution of his American contemporary Franz Boas. Malinowski's generalizations were rarely the product of systematic cross-cultural comparison: having rejected the Victorians' reliance on written sources, he went to the other extreme and generalized from his own intensive but necessarily limited fieldwork. His theory—"functionalism"—stressed the role of human culture in satisfying a hierarchy of human needs, consisting of those that are basic (i.e., biological), derived (i.e., cultural or social), and integrative (i.e., normative). He attacked the evolutionists' concept of "survivals" and the diffusionists' concept of "culture complexes," with their implications that cultures are heterogeneous accumulations of sometimes useless objects and institutions. While his American contemporaries, notably Ruth Benedict, saw cultural unity in terms of a culture's dominant style or personality, he saw it in the fulfillment of individual and group needs. In part because of Malinowski's own work, evolutionism and diffusionism were both in retreat by the 1930s. As they receded from view, functionalism lost much of its original force, and after his death Malinowski the ethnographer was praised above Malinowski the theorist.

Malinowski never wrote an account of Trobriand culture as a whole; he studied individual institutions in their social settings. The attention he paid to Trobriand economics and sex was in line with the premises of functional theory. His book Argonauts of the Western Pacific describes the complex and highly ritualized interisland trade known as kula; The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) deals with sex and the family; and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935) discusses Trobriand agriculture. In all these works Malinowski de-emphasizes the "primitive" nature of Trobriand life by stressing the rational organization of economic life and focusing on the nuclear family rather than on the segmentary kinship system.

Malinowski also applied functional analysis to less obviously useful activities. In Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926), he argues that myths are neither explanations of natural phenomena nor poetry; instead, they are validations of the social order. The mythic "charter" strengthens tradition by appealing to the design and experience of a supernatural past. Myths of origin, for example, explain the relative superiority and inferiority of different Trobriand clans. Malinowski's explanation of magic denies both Lucien Lévy-Bruhl's claim that primitive thought is "prelogical" and Frazer's theory of an evolutionary progression from magic to religion to science. In "Magic, Science and Religion," an essay in Science, Religion and Reality, edited by Joseph Needham (London, 1925), Malinowski argues that magic provides psychological encouragement and a rationale for group cooperation in those activities where primitives lack the knowledge or technical ability to ensure success. Magic is a supplement to, not a substitute for, practical activity.

Malinowski's analysis of religion was not only less original but also less successful than his treatments of myth and magic. He denied Émile Durkheim's claim that the object of worship is society itself, although conceding that religion is socially organized. Religion is man's consolation in the face of tragedy and uncertainty, not a means of social cohesion. It can be distinguished from magic by the absence of an external goal, in that worship is an end in itself. Malinowski never resolved the tension between his individualistic analysis of religious motivation and his sociological analysis of religious practice. The absence of worship on the Trobriand Islands may have denied him the stimulus necessary for a more sustained inquiry.

Elsie Malinowski died in 1935, after a long illness. At the end of 1938, Malinowski left London for an American sabbatical; rather than return to Europe during World War II, he was for three years a visiting professor at Yale University. In 1940 he married Valetta Swann, an artist. During the summers of 1940 and 1941 he went into the field again to study Mexican peasant markets in conjunction with a young Mexican ethnologist, Julio de la Fuente. In early 1942 he accepted Yale's offer of a permanent professorship effective that October. He never took up the appointment; his death of a heart attack on May 16, 1942, caught him in the midst of new beginnings. Doubly an émigré, he lost the chance to play in America the commanding role he had held in British social science between the wars.

Bibliography

A full list of Malinowski's works appears in the essential secondary work, Man and Culture; An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski, edited by Raymond Firth (London, 1957). Malinowski's A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (New York, 1967) covers his Mailu research and his second stay in the Trobriands. Malinowski's and Julio de la Fuente's Malinowski in Mexico: The Economics of a Mexican Market System, edited by Susan Drucker-Brown (London, 1982), is the result of his last fieldwork. The Ethnography of Malinowski: The Trobriand Islands, 1915–18, edited by Michael W. Young (London, 1979) is a convenient reader, and its editorial notes cite recent work on both Malinowski and the Trobriands. The first comprehensive challenge to Sex and Repression is Melford E. Spiro's Oedipus in the Trobriands (Chicago, 1982).

New Sources

Ellen, R. F. Malinowski between Two Worlds: The Polish Roots of an Anthropological Tradition. Cambridge U.K.; New York, 1988.

Gonzalez, Roberto J. "Between Two Poles: Bronislaw Malinowski, Ludwik Fleck, and the Anthropology of Science." Current Anthropology 36, no. 5 (1995): 177–204.

Stocking, George W. Malinowski, Rivers, Benedict, and Others: Essays on Culture and Personality. Madison, Wis., 1986.

Strenski, Ivan. Malinowski and the Work of Myth. Princeton, N.J., 1992.

Young, Michael W. "Malinowski and the Function of Culture." In Creating Culture: Profiles in the Study of Culture, edited by Diane J. Austin-Broos, pp. 124–140. Sydney, 1987.

Michael A. Baenen (1987)

Revised Bibliography