Bronisław Malinowski

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For the Olympic champion athlete see Bronisław Malinowski (athlete).

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (Polish pronunciation: [ˌmaliˈnɔfski]; 7 April 1884 – 16 May 1942) was a Polish^[1] anthropologist, widely considered one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists. His pioneering ethnographic fieldwork made a major contribution to the study of Melanesia and of reciprocity.

[edit] Life

Malinowski was born in Kraków, Poland, to an upper-middle-class family. His father was a professor and his mother the daughter of a land-owning family. As a child he was frail, often suffering from ill health, yet he excelled academically. In 1908 he received a doctorate in philosophy from Kraków's Jagiellonian University, where he focused on mathematics and the physical sciences. While attending the University he became ill and, while recuperating, decided to be an anthropologist as a result of reading James Frazer's The Golden Bough. This book turned his interest to ethnology, which he pursued at Leipzig University, where he studied under economist Karl Bücher and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. In 1910 he went to England, studying at the London School of Economics under C.G. Seligman and Edward Westermarck.

In 1914 he traveled to Papua (in what would later become Papua New Guinea), where he conducted fieldwork at Mailu and then, more famously, in the Trobriand Islands. On his most famous trip to the area, he became stranded. The First World War had broken out, and, as a Pole from Austria-Hungary in a British controlled area, Australian authorities gave him two options, to be exiled to the Trobriand islands or face internment for the duration of the war. Malinowski chose the Trobriand islands. It was during this period that he conducted his fieldwork on Kula and advanced the practice of participant observation, which remains the hallmark of ethnographic research today.

By 1922 Malinowski had earned a doctorate of science in anthropology and was teaching at the London School of Economics. That year his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific was published. It was universally regarded as a masterpiece, and Malinowski became one of the best-known anthropologists in the world. For the next two decades, he would establish the London School of Economics as one of Britain's greatest centers of anthropology.

Malinowski taught intermittently in the United States. When World War II broke out during one of his American visits, he stayed there. He took up a position at Yale University, where he remained until his death. In 1942 he co-founded the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

Malinowski died on 16 May 1942, just after his 58th birthday, of a heart attack while preparing to conduct summer fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico. He was interred at Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut.^[2]

[edit] Ideas

Malinowski is renowned as one of anthropology's most skilled ethnographers. He is often referred to as the first researcher to bring anthropology "off the verandah" (also the name of a documentary about his work), that is, experiencing the everyday life of his subjects along with them. Malinowski emphasised the importance of detailed participant observation and argued that anthropologists must have daily contact with their informants if they were to adequately record the "imponderabilia of everyday life" that were so important to understanding a different culture.

He stated that the goal of the anthropologist, or ethnographer, is:

to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.

—Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Dutton 1961 edition, p. 25.

However, in reference to the Kula, Malinowski also stated, in the same edition, pp. 83–84:

Yet it must be remembered that what appears to us an extensive, complicated, and yet well ordered institution is the outcome of so many doings and pursuits, carried on by savages, who have no laws or aims or charters definitely laid down. They have no knowledge of the total outline of any of their social structure. They know their own motives, know the purpose of individual actions and the rules which apply to them, but how, out of these, the whole collective institution shapes, this is beyond their mental range. Not even the most intelligent native has any clear idea of the Kula as a big, organised social construction, still less of its sociological function and implications...The integration of all the details observed, the achievement of a sociological synthesis of all the various, relevant symptoms, is the task of the Ethnographer...the Ethnographer has to construct the picture of the big institution, very much as the physicist constructs his theory from the experimental data, which always have been within reach of everybody, but needed a consistent interpretation.

In these two passages, Malinowski anticipated the distinction between description and analysis and between the views of actors and analysts. This distinction continues to inform anthropological method and theory.

His study of Kula was also vital to the development of an anthropological theory of reciprocity, and his material from the Trobriands was extensively discussed in Marcel Mauss's seminal essay The Gift. Malinowski also originated the school of social anthropology known as functionalism. In contrast to Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism, Malinowski argued that culture functioned to meet the needs of individuals rather than society as a whole. He reasoned that when the needs of individuals are met, who comprise society, then the needs of society are met. To Malinowski, the feelings of people, their motives, were crucial knowledge to understand the way their society functioned:

Besides the firm outline of tribal constitution and crystallised cultural items which form the skeleton, besides the data of daily life and ordinary behaviour, which are, so to speak, its flesh and blood, there is still to be recorded the spirit—the natives' views and opinions and utterances.

—Argonauts, p. 25.

Apart from fieldwork, Malinowski also challenged common western views such as Freud's Oedipus complex and their claim for universality. He initiated a cross-cultural approach in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) where he demonstrated that the complex was not universal.

[edit] Works

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Bronisław Malinowski

• The Trobriand Islands (1915)
• Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
• Myth in Primitive Society (1926)
• Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926)
• Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927)
• The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929)
• Coral Gardens and their Magic: A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands (1935)
• The Scientific Theory of Culture (1944)
• "Freedom & Civilization" (1944)
• Magic, Science, and Religion (1948)
• The Dynamics of Culture Change (1945)
• A Diary In the Strict Sense of the Term (1967)

[edit] Universities

• London School of Economics
• University of London
• Cornell University
• Harvard University
• Yale University

[edit] See also

• Maria Czaplicka
• List of Poles
• List of recipients of the Bronislaw Malinowski Award of the Society for Applied Anthropology

[edit] Notes

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2008)

[edit] References

• Michael Young, Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884-1920, Yale University Press, 2004.
• Merwyn Garbarino, Sociocultural Theory in Anthropology, Waveland Press, 183.

[edit] External links

• Malinowski; Archive (Real audio stream) of BBC Radio 4 edition of 'Thinking allowed' on Malinowski
• Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands, at sacred-texts.com
• Papers of Bronislaw Malinowski at LSE Archives
• Malinowski's fieldwork photographs, Trobriand Islands, 1915-1918
• About the functional theory (selected chapters)