Malinowski, Bronislaw 1884-1942

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski is one of the most charismatic personalities in the history of anthropology. Malinowski defined long-term ethnographic fieldwork as the hallmark of social anthropology. His functionalist approach dominated British social anthropology well into the 1950s. He was a powerful promoter of social anthropology as an academic discipline, both by teaching a whole generation of students and by securing research grants through appeal to the usefulness of ethnographic knowledge to projects of development. A European intellectual with wide-ranging interests, Malinowski was gifted at learning languages and was a brilliant writer. Much of today’s fascination with Malinowski revolves around the circumstances of his pioneering fieldwork in Melanesia from 1914 to 1918: how he happened to choose his field sites; how he positioned himself toward the “natives,” colonial administrators, and academic colleagues; how important the method of participant observation was in relation to other data collection techniques; and how different ethnographic experiences were expressed in different forms of writing.

Born in Krakow, Malinowski first studied physics and philosophy, receiving a doctorate from Jagiellonian University in 1908. His readings during this time were broad, with Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) and the physicist-philosopher Ernst Mach (1838–1916) among his intellectual influences (Early Writings [1993]). He spent a further year at Leipzig University studying Völkerpsychologie (cultural psychology) with Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920). In 1910 Malinowski traveled to Britain and started to study ethnology with Edward Westermarck (1862–1939) and Charles Gabriel Seligman (1873–1940) at the London School of Economics. He was to remain attached to the London School of Economics for most of his academic career, becoming a reader in 1923 and a professor in 1927. Just before the outbreak of World War II (1939–1945), Malinowski was on sabbatical in the United States and decided not to return to Europe. He became a professor of anthropology at Yale University in 1942, but died the same year.

Malinowski’s writings cover a range of different regions (Australia, Melanesia, Mexico), but his most famous works are ethnographic studies of the Trobriand Islands in the southwest Pacific. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Malinowski describes the kula, a system of ceremonial exchanges between a group of islands. In Malinowski’s view, the kula is primarily about establishing reciprocal ties, whereas economic gain is only of secondary importance. Magic, religion, and myth are central themes in many of his works. For example, in Coral Gardens (1935), Malinowski analyzes the function of magic spells in Trobriand horticulture. This work also presents most clearly the powers of Malinowski’s linguistic approach. Crime and Custom (1926) is a pioneering work in legal anthropology. Showing that a society’s ideals about proper conduct must be clearly distinguished from everyday reality, Malinowski carves out a distinctly anthropological perspective on law and society. A number of his works are concerned with Trobriand sexuality and family relations (e.g., Sex and Repression [1927]) and reflect Malinowski’s enduring interest in Sigmund Freud’s (1856–1939) psychoanalytic theories. His more theoretical works, such as A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944), have not preserved the same appeal as his ethnographies. Some of his wartime writings are devoted to a passionate defense of liberalism (Freedom and Civilization [1944]). His posthumously published fieldwork diary (1967) remains controversial because of racist remarks, but has also significantly deepened the understanding of his ethnographic oeuvre.

SEE ALSO Anthropology, British

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1926. Crime and Custom in Savage Society. New York: Harcourt.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1927. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. New York: Harcourt.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1935. Coral Gardens and Their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands. 2 vols. London: Allen and Unwin.

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

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1944. Freedom and Civilization. Ed. A. V. Malinowska. New York: Roy.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1967. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Trans. Norbert Guterman. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1993. The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski. Eds. Robert J. Thornton and Peter Skalnik. Trans. Ludwik Krzyzanowski. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Young, Michael. 2004. Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Stefan Ecks