Bronisław Malinowski

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Bronisław Malinowski
Bronislawmalinowski.jpg
Born
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski

7 April 1884
Kraków, Galicia and Lodomeria, Austria-Hungary
Died16 May 1942(1942-05-16) (aged 58)
New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.
Alma materJagiellonian University (PhD)
University of Leipzig (PhD)
London School of Economics
Known forFather of social anthropology
Scientific career
InstitutionsLondon School of Economics, Yale University
Doctoral students
 
Other notable students
 
InfluencesÉmile Durkheim
Charles Gabriel Seligman
Edvard Westermarck
Wilhelm Wundt
InfluencedVirtually all subsequent social anthropology
Anthropology
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Types
Archaeological
Biological
Linguistic
Research framework
Key concepts
Key theories
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Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (Polish: [brɔˈɲiswaf maliˈnɔfskʲi]; 7 April 1884 – 16 May 1942) was an anthropologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research were a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.[1][2][3][4][5]

From 1910, Malinowski studied exchange and economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) 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 (1922), 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.

Biography[]

Early life[]

Malinowski was born on 7 April 1884, in Kraków, Austrian partition of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, then part of the Austro-Hungarian province known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.[6]:332 His father was a professor, and his mother was the daughter of a landowning family.[citation needed] As a child he was frail, often suffering from ill health, yet he excelled academically. On 30 May 1902 he passed his matura examinations (with a distinction), and later that year he begun studying ad the College of Philosophy of the Kraków's Jagiellonian University, where initially he focused on mathematics and the physical sciences.[6]:332 While attending the university he became severely ill (possibly with tuberculosis) and, while recuperating, his interest turned more towards social sciences, as he took courses in philosophy and education.[6]:332–333 In 1908, he received a doctorate in philosophy from the Jagiellonian University.[6]:333

Already during his time as a student he became interested in travelling abroad, and has visited Finland, Italy, the Canary Islands, Western Asia and North Africa; some of those trips were at least partially motivated by his health concerns.[6]:333 He also spend three semesters at the University of Leipzig (c. 1909-1910), where he studied under economist Karl Bücher and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt.[6]:333 With regards to his scholarly interests, he decided to be an anthropologist as a result of reading James Frazer's The Golden Bough. This book turned his interest to ethnology.[citation needed]

In 1910, he went to England, becoming a postgraduate student at the London School of Economics under C. G. Seligman[citation needed] and Edvard Westermarck.[6]:333

Career[]

In 1911 Malinowski published his first academic paper, that one was in Polish language (Totemizm i egzogamia, published in  [pl]). The subsequent year he published his first English academic paper, and in 1913 he published his first book (The Family among the Australian Aborigines). and would also that year gave his first lectures at the LSE, on topics related to psychology of religion and social psychology.[6]:333

In June 1914 he departed London, travelling to Australia, as the first step in his expedition to Papua (in what would later become Papua New Guinea).[6]:333 The expedition was organized under the aegis of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.[6]:333 Shortly afterward, he encountered issues due to the outbreak of World War I as although Polish by ethnicity, he was a subject of Austria-Hungary, which was at the state of war with the United Kingdom. Malinowski decided not to return to Europe from the British-controlled region because, and was allowed to stay in the Australian region by the British authorities.[6]:333 His first field trip, lasting from August 1914 to March 1915, took him to the Toulon Island (Mailu Island) and the Woodlark Island.[6]:333 This field trip was described in his 1915 monograph The natives of Mailu.[6]:333

Later he conducted research in the Trobriand Islands. The ethnographic collection he made on the Trobriand Islands is now held by the British Museum.[citation needed] 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.[7][8]

In 1920, he published a scientific article on the Kula Ring,[9] 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.[10]

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.[11] 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 publication.[12]

Works[]

Except a few works from the early 1910s, all of Malinowski's research was published in English.[6]:333

His first book, The Family among the Australian Aborigines, published in 1913, was based on materials he collected and wrote in the years 1909-1911. It was well received not just by contemporary reviewers, but also by scholars generations later. In 1963, in his foreword to its new edition, John Arundel Barnes called it an epochal work, and noted how it discredited the previously held theory that Australian Aborigines have no institution of family.[6]:333

Ideas and influences[]

Malinowski is often considered one of anthropology's most skilled ethnographers, especially because of his 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" (a phrase that is also the name of a documentary about his work),[13] that is, experiencing the everyday life of his subjects along with them.[14] 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" (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Dutton 1961 edition, p. 25.)

However, in reference to the Kula ring, 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.

Malinowski with natives, Trobriand Islands, 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.[15][16]

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 functionalism. In contrast to Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism, Malinowski argued that culture functioned to meet the needs of individuals rather than the needs of 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 to understanding the way their society functioned:

Besides the firm outline of tribal constitution and crystallized cultural items which form the skeleton, besides the data of daily life and ordinary behavior, 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. 22.

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 (1927) 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. 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.[17] Mark Mosko wrote in 2014 that further research on Trobriand people affirmed some of 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, but he also stated that "the preponderance of ethnographic evidence ... refutes Malinowski’s notorious claims of Islanders’ supposed “ignorance of physiological paternity”".[18]

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, , took its name from Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific.

Controversy[]

Main article: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term

The personal diary of Malinowski, along with several others, written in Polish, was discovered in his Yale University office after his death. First published (in 1967, posthumously) 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."[12]

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."[19] But in 1988, Geertz referred to the diary as a "backstage masterpiece of anthropology, our The Double Helix".[20] 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".[21]

Works[]

  • Malinowski, B. (1913). The family among the Australian Aborigines: a sociological study. London: University of London Press.
  • Malinowski, B. (1922). Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An account of native enterprise and adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (Enhanced Edition reissued Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2013).
  • Malinowski, B. (1924). Mutterrechtliche Familie und Ödipus-Komplex. Eine psychoanalytische Studie (in German). Leipzig: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag.
  • Malinowski, B. (1926). Myth in primitive psychology. London: Norton.
  • Malinowski, B. (1926). Crime and custom in savage society. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
  • Malinowski, B. (1927). Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.
  • Malinowski, B.; H. Ellis (1929). The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia. An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage, and Family Life Among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea. London.
  • Malinowski, B.; E.R. Leach; J. Berry (1935). Coral gardens and their magic. London: Allen & Unwin.
  • Malinowski, B. (1944). . Chapel Hill, N. Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.
  • Malinowski, B. (1947). Freedom & Civilization. London.
  • Malinowski, B. (1946). P.M. Kaberry (ed.). The Dynamics of Culture Change: An Inquiry Into Race Relations in Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  • Malinowski, B. (1948). Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press (Reissued Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1992).
  • Malinowski, B. (1962). Sex, Culture, and Myth. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
  • Malinowski, B. (1967). A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World.
  • Malinowski, B. (1993). R.J. Thornton & P. Skalnik (ed.). The early writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Universities[]

See also[]

References[]

Sources[]

  1. ^ Murdock, George Peter (9 July 1943). "Bronislaw Malinowski". American Anthropologist. 45 (3): 441–451. doi:10.1525/aa.1943.45.3.02a00090.
  2. ^ Firth, Raymond. 1957. Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
  3. ^ Senft, Günter. 1997. Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski. in Verschueren, Ostman, Blommaert & Bulcaen (eds.) Handbook of Pragmatics Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins [1]
  4. ^ Young, Michael. 2004 Malinowski : Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920. Yale University Press.
  5. ^ Gaillard, Gérald (2004). The Routledge Dictionary of Anthropologists. Peter James Bowman (trans.) (English translation of Dictionnaire des ethnologues et des anthropologues [1997] ed.). London and New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-22825-5. OCLC 52288643.
  6. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o Armon, Witold (1974). "Bronisław Malinowski". Polish Biographical Dictionary (Polski słownik biograficzny) (in Polish). 19. National Film Archive - Audiovisual Institute. pp. 332–336. Retrieved 29 July 2021.
  7. ^ Gaillard 2004 p. 139
  8. ^ Senft 1997 p. 217
  9. ^ Malinowski B (1920). "Kula: the Circulating Exchange of Valuables in the Archipelagoes of Eastern New Guinea". Man. 20: 97–105. doi:10.2307/2840430. JSTOR 2840430.
  10. ^ "B.K. Malinowski (1884–1942)". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 19 July 2015.
  11. ^ Wayne, H. (1995). The Story of a Marriage: The Letters of Bronisław Malinowski and Elsie Masson. London: Routledge. p. 241.
  12. ^ Jump up to: a b Press, Stanford University. "A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term | Bronislaw Malinowski With a New Introduction by Raymond Firth". www.sup.org.
  13. ^ "Bronislaw Malinowski: Off the Veranda." 52 minutes. Films Media Group, 1985.
  14. ^ But see Kluckhohn (1943. "Bronislaw Malinowski 1884–1942", The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 56, No. 221 (Jul. – Sep. 1943), pp. 208–219) for another viewpoint, emphasizing the existence of an ethnographic tradition in the US prior to Malinowski's research.
  15. ^ Gaillard 2004 p. 141
  16. ^ Giulio Angioni, L'antropologia funzionalista di B. K. Malinowski, in Tre saggi sull'antropologia dell'età coloniale, Palermo, Flaccovio,1973, pp. 200–221
  17. ^ Sagan, Carl (1979). Broca's Brain: The Romance of Science. Hodder and Stoughton. pp. 79–80. ISBN 0-340-24424-0.
  18. ^ Mosko, Mark (June 2014). "Malinowski's magical puzzles". HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 4 (1): 1–47. doi:10.14318/hau4.1.001. hdl:1885/58368. S2CID 144815484. Notes ... 21.This version of Trobriand cosmology, of itself, is consistent with the preponderance of ethnographic evidence which refutes Malinowski’s notorious claims of Islanders’ supposed “ignorance of physiological paternity”
  19. ^ Geertz, Clifford (14 September 1967). "Under the Mosquito Net". New York Review of Books. Retrieved 13 January 2020.
  20. ^ (1988). Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press. p. 75.
  21. ^ Young, Michael W. "Writing his Life through the Other: The Anthropology of Malinowski". The Public Domain Review.

Sources[]

  • Firth, Raymond (1960). Man and culture: an evaluation of the work of Bronislaw Malinowski. London: Routledge.

External links[]

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