Bronisław Malinowski

Bronisław Malinowski (b. 1884–d. 1942) is arguably the most influential anthropologist of the 20th century, certainly for British social anthropology. The list of his students is a who’s who of the most important British anthropologists of the 1930s through to the 1970s and includes, among others, Raymond Firth, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Audrey Richards, Edmund Leach, Ashley Montagu, Meyer Fortes, and Isaac Schapera. Malinowski saw himself as effecting a revolution in anthropology by rejecting the evolutionary paradigm of his predecessors and introducing functionalism, whereby institutions satisfied human biological needs, as the way to understand other cultures. His lasting legacy, however, is methodological rather than theoretical. It was by exhorting anthropologists to give up their comfortable position on the veranda of the missionary compound or government station and to go and live and work with the people they studied that he effected his real innovation: fieldwork. Although not the first to conduct fieldwork, his lengthy stay among the Trobriand Islanders during World War I established, as Edmund Leach (in Singer 2011, cited under Documentaries) has remarked, how to “do” anthropology. Living with the people he studied, getting to know them personally, participating in their activities, and conducting his research in the vernacular has since become known as participant observation. His collection of monographs and numerous articles on the Trobriand Islanders is perhaps the most extensive ethnography of any people written to date. His magnum opus, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, published in 1922, in which he describes the Kula ring (a complex interisland exchange of arm shell bracelets and necklaces), is one of the first modern ethnographies. Unlike earlier monographs, which were dry catalogues of facts, Malinowski’s ethnographies painted a romantic picture of native life, had an institutional focus, and provided a vivid narrative where the ethnographer is seen to interact with real people. A prolific writer, Malinowski tackled some of the most important and controversial topics of his day: economics, religion, family, sex, psychology, colonialism, and war. He insisted that a proper understanding of culture required viewing these various aspects in context. Malinowski was instrumental in transforming British social anthropology from an ethnocentric discipline concerned with historical origins and based on the writings of travelers, missionaries, and colonial administrators to one concerned with understanding the interconnections between various institutions and based on fieldwork, where the goal was to “grasp the native’s point of view” (Malinowski 1984, p. 25, cited under Fieldwork and Ethnography).