Bronisław Malinowski

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (; 7 April 1884 – 16 May 1942) was a Polish anthropologist and ethnologist whose writings on ethnography, social theory, and field research have exerted a lasting influence on the discipline of anthropology.

Malinowski was born and raised in what was part of the Austrian partition of Poland, Kraków. He graduated from King John III Sobieski 2nd High School. In the years 1902–1906 he studied at the philosophy department of the Jagiellonian University and received his doctorate there in 1908. In 1910, at the London School of Economics (LSE), he worked on exchange and economics, analysing Aboriginal Australia through ethnographic documents. In 1914, he travelled to Australia. He conducted research in the Trobriand Islands and other regions in New Guinea and Melanesia where he stayed for several years, studying indigenous cultures.

Returning to England after World War I, he published his principal work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), which established him as one of Europe's most important anthropologists. He took posts as a lecturer and later as chair in anthropology at the LSE, attracting large numbers of students and exerting great influence on the development of British social anthropology. Over the years, he guest-lectured at several American universities; when World War II broke out, he remained in the United States, taking an appointment at Yale University. He died in 1942 while at Yale and was interred in a grave in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1967 his widow, Valetta Swann, published his personal diary kept during his fieldwork in Melanesia and New Guinea. It has since been a source of controversy, because of its ethnocentric and egocentric nature.

Malinowski's 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 anthropological field methods were foundational to early anthropology, popularizing the concept of participatory observation. His approach to social theory was a form of psychological functionalism that emphasised how social and cultural institutions serve basic human needs—a perspective opposed to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism, which emphasised ways in which social institutions function in relation to society as a whole.

Biography

Early life

Malinowski, a scion of the Polish szlachta (nobility), was born on 7 April 1884 in Kraków, in the Austrian Partition of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth – then part of the Austro-Hungarian province known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. His father, Lucjan Malinowski, was a professor of Slavic philology at Jagiellonian University, and his mother was the daughter of a landowning family. As a child he was frail, often in ill health, but excelled academically. On 30 May 1902 he passed his matura examinations (with distinction) at the Jan III Sobieski Secondary School, and later that year began studying at the College of Philosophy of Kraków's Jagiellonian University, where he initially focused on mathematics and the physical sciences. and in 1913 his first book, The Family among the Australian Aborigines. In the same year he gave his first lectures at LSE, on topics related to psychology of religion and social psychology.

His first field trip, lasting from August 1914 to March 1915, took him to the Toulon Island (Mailu Island) and the Woodlark Island. The ethnographic collection of artifacts from his expeditions is mostly held by the British Museum and the Melbourne Museum. For the next two decades, he would establish the LSE as Europe's main centre of anthropology. In 1924 he was promoted to a reader, and in 1927, a full professor (foundation Professor of Social Anthropology). In 1934 he travelled to British East Africa and Southern Africa, carrying out research among several tribes such as the Bemba, Kikuyu, Maragoli, Maasai and the Swazi people. When World War II broke out during one of his American visits, he stayed there. In 1941 he carried out field research among the Mexican peasants in Oaxaca.

Works

Except for a few works from the early 1910s, all of Malinowski's research was published in English. He incorporated the paper into his Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927).

A number of his works were published posthumously or collected in anthologies: A Scientific Theory of Culture and Others Essays (1944), Freedom & Civilization (1944), The Dynamics of Culture Change (1945), Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (1948), Sex, Culture, and Myth (1962), the controversial A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967), and The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski (1993). Writing in 1987, James Clifford called it "a crucial document for the history of anthropology".

Many of Malinowski's works entered public domain in 2013.

Ideas and influences

Already a year after his death Clyde Kluckhohn described his influence in the field as significant if somewhat controversial, noting that to some he "was a major prophet", and that "no anthropologist has ever had so wide a popular audience". In 1974, described many of his works as "classics".

Ethnography and fieldwork

Malinowski is 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 André Singer's 1986 documentary about his work), that is, stressing the need for fieldwork enabling the researcher to experience the everyday life of his subjects along with them. Malinowski emphasized 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". Because of the influence of his argument, he is sometimes credited, particularly in the United Kingdom, with having invented the field of ethnography. J. I. (Hans) Bakker says that Malinowski "wrote at least two of the 100 most significant ethnographies of all time".

thumb|left|Four mwali, one of the two main kinds of objects in Melanesia's [[Kula ring|Kula ritual. Photo in Malinowski's Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922).]]

Malinowski in his pioneering research set up a tent in the middle of villages he studied, in which he lived for extended periods of time, weeks or months. His argument was shaped by his initial experiences as an anthropologist in the mid-1910s in Australia and Oceania, where during his first field trip he found himself grossly unprepared for it, due to not knowing the language of the people he set to study, nor being able to observe their daily customs sufficiently (during that initial trip, he was lodged with a local missionary and just made daily trips to the village, an endeavor which became increasingly difficult once he lost his translator). His pioneering decision to subsequently immerse himself in the life of the natives represents his solution to this problem, and was the message he addressed to new, young anthropologists, aiming to both improve their experience and allow them to produce better data. Ian Jarvie wrote that many of Malinowski's writing represented an "attack" on Frazer's school of fieldwork, although James A. Boon suggested this conflict has been exaggerated. Malinowski understood basic needs as arising from the necessities of biology; and culture, as group cooperation – as a way of addressing the basic needs. Thus, biological needs include metabolism, reproduction, bodily comforts, safety, movement, growth, and health; and the corresponding cultural responses are a food supply, kinship, shelter, protection, activities, training, and hygiene.

Malinowski, in what is considered an important contribution to cross-cultural psychology, challenged the claim, to universality, of Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex.

In 1920 he published his first scientific article on the Kula ring. In reference to the Kula ring, he later wrote:

thumb|Malinowski with Trobriand Islanders, 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 methods and theories. His research on the Trobriand traditional economy, with its particular focus on magic and magicians, has been described as a substantial contribution to economic anthropology. Many of Malinowski's students worked in Africa, likely due to his involvement with the International African Institute. Edith Clarke, Feliks Gross, Phyllis Kaberry, Jomo Kenyatta, Edmund Leach, Lucy Mair, , Hortense Powdermaker,

The Society for Applied Anthropology established the Bronislaw Malinowski Award in his honor in 1950. The award was awarded only until 1952, then went on hiatus until being re-established in 1973; it has been awarded annually since.

Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz based a character, Duke of Nevermore, from his novel ' (written in the 1910s but not published until 1972) on Malinowski. Other works about Malinowski have appeared since, such as Michael W. Young's Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884–1920 (2004).

He is portrayed by Tom Courtenay in the Young Indiana Jones TV movie Treasure of the Peacock's Eye.

The life and work of Malinowski is the subject of a documentary film Tales From The Jungle: Malinowski aired by BBC Four channel in 2007.

Personal life

In his youth he was a close friend of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, a Polish artist; this friendship had much impact on Malinowski's early life. They had a romantic triangle with Zofia Romer née Dembowska. Throughout his life he gained the reputation of a philanderer.

In 1919 Malinowski married Elsie Rosaline Masson, an Australian photographer, writer, and traveler (daughter of David Orme Masson), with whom he had three daughters: Józefa (born 1920), Wanda (born 1922), and Helena (born 1925). Elsie died in 1935, and in 1940 Malinowski married the English painter Valetta Swann.

While Malinowski was brought up in the Catholic faith, after his mother's death he described himself as agnostic.

Selected publications

Notes

References

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 held at LSE Library
Malinowski's fieldwork photographs, Trobriand Islands, 1915–1918
Savage Memory – documentary about Malinowski's legacy
Bronislaw Malinowski papers (MS 19). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.