Bronisław Malinowski


Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was an anthropologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research were a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.
From 1910, Malinowski studied exchange and economics at the London School of Economics under Charles Gabriel Seligman and Edvard Alexander Westermarck, analysing patterns of exchange in Aboriginal Australia through ethnographic documents. In 1914, he was given a chance to travel to New Guinea accompanying anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett, but as World War I broke out and Malinowski was an Austrian subject, and thereby an enemy of the British commonwealth, he was unable to travel back to England. The Australian government nonetheless provided him with permission and funds to undertake ethnographic work within their territories and Malinowski chose to go to the Trobriand Islands, in Melanesia where he stayed for several years, studying the indigenous culture. Upon his return to England after the war, he published his main work Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which established him as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe of that time. He took posts as lecturer and later as a chair in anthropology at the LSE, attracting large numbers of students and exerting great influence on the development of British social anthropology. Among his students in this period were such prominent anthropologists as Raymond Firth, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Hortense Powdermaker, Edmund Leach, Audrey Richards and Meyer Fortes. From 1933 he visited several American universities, and when World War II began, he decided to stay there, taking an appointment at Yale University.
His ethnography of the Trobriand Islands described the complex institution of the Kula ring and became foundational for subsequent theories of reciprocity and exchange. He was also widely regarded as an eminent fieldworker and his texts regarding the anthropological field methods were foundational to early anthropology, for example coining the term participatory observation. His approach to social theory was a brand of psychological functionalism emphasising how social and cultural institutions serve basic human needs, a perspective opposed to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism that emphasised the ways in which social institutions function in relation to society as a whole.

Early life

Malinowski was born on 7 April 1884, in Kraków, then part of the Austro-Hungarian province known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, to an upper-middle-class Polish family. His father was a professor, and his mother was the daughter of a landowning 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 the University of Leipzig, 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 Edvard Westermarck.

Career

In 1914, he travelled to Papua, where he conducted fieldwork at Mailu Island and then, more famously, in the Trobriand Islands. The ethnographic collection he made on the Trobriand Islands is now held by the British Museum. On his most famous trip to the area, he became stranded due to the outbreak of World War I. Malinowski was not allowed to return to Europe from the British-controlled region because, though Polish by ethnicity, he was a subject of Austria-Hungary. Australian authorities gave him the opportunity of conducting research in Melanesia, an opportunity he happily embraced. It was during this period that he conducted his fieldwork on the Kula ring and advanced the practice of participant observation, which remains the hallmark of ethnographic research today.
In 1920, he published a scientific article on the Kula Ring, perhaps the first documentation of generalised exchange. In 1922, he 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 widely 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 Europe's main centre of anthropology. He became a British citizen in 1931. In 1933, he became a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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.

Death

Malinowski died on 16 May 1942, aged 58, of a heart attack while preparing to conduct summer fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico. He was interred at Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut. His personal diary, written during his fieldwork in Melanesia and New Guinea, was published posthumously in 1967 by his widow Valetta Swann and has been a source of controversy since its inception.

Ideas and influences

Malinowski is often considered one of anthropology's most skilled ethnographers, especially because of the highly methodical and well theorised approach to the study of social systems. He is often referred to as the first researcher to bring anthropology "off the verandah", 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 are to adequately record the "imponderabilia of everyday life" that are 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"
However, in reference to the Kula ring, Malinowski also stated, in the same edition, pp. 83–84:
, 1918
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 the Kula ring 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 originated the school of social anthropology known as :wikt:functionalism|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, who comprise society, are met, then the needs of society are met. To Malinowski, the feelings of people and their motives were crucial knowledge to understand the way their society functioned:
Apart from fieldwork, Malinowski also challenged the claim to universality of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. He initiated a cross-cultural approach in Sex and Repression in Savage Society where he demonstrated that specific psychological complexes are not universal.
Malinowski likewise influenced the course of African history, serving as an academic mentor to Jomo Kenyatta, the father and first president of modern-day Kenya. Malinowski also wrote the introduction to Facing Mount Kenya, Kenyatta's ethnographic study of the Gikuyu tribe. The Kulurami tribe in Africa also caught his attention.
In a brief passage in his 1979 book Broca's Brain, the late science populariser Carl Sagan criticised Malinowski for thinking that "he had discovered a people in the Trobriand Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth", arguing that it was more likely that the islanders were simply making fun of Malinowski. However Mark Mosko wrote in 2014 that further research on Trobriand people affirmed Malinowski's claims about their beliefs on procreation, adding that the dogmas are tied to a complicated system of belief encapsulating magic into beliefs about human and plant procreation.
The Malinowski Memorial Lecture, an annual anthropology lecture series at London School of Economics, is named after him. A student-led anthropology magazine at the LSE, The Argonaut, took its name from Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific.

Controversy

The personal diary of Malinowski, along with several others, written in Polish, was discovered in his Yale University office after his death. First published as Bronislaw Malinowski's diary, covering the period of his fieldwork in 1914–1915 and 1917–1918 in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands, it set off a storm of controversy.
Many anthropologists felt that the publication of the diary—which Raymond Firth describes as "this revealing, egocentric, obsessional document"—was a profound disservice to the memory of one of the giant figures in the history of anthropology.
Almost certainly never intended to be published, and against his daughters’ wishes and to the dismay of many colleagues who had heard rumours of its controversial contents, his widow published a translation under the title A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Malinowski's diary was intensely personal and brutally honest. He kept it, he said, "as a means of self-analysis." Reviews ranged from "it is to the discredit of all concerned that the diary has now been committed to print" to "fascinating reading."
Twenty years have passed, and Raymond Firth suggests that the book has moved over to a more central place in the literature of anthropological reflection. On the diary's initial publication in 1967, Clifford Geertz felt that the "gross, tiresome" diary revealed Malinowski as "a crabbed, self-preoccupied, hypochondriacal narcissist, whose fellow-feeling for the people he lived with was limited in the extreme." But in 1988, Geertz referred to the diary as a "backstage masterpiece of anthropology, our The Double Helix". Similarly in 1987, James Clifford called it "a crucial document for the history of anthropology. The Diary abundantly revealed some unpleasant aspects of Malinowski’s character".

Works