Anthropology and linguistics in Great Britain: Bronislaw Malinowski and John Rupert Firth

This paper examines how Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist most of whose career was in London, took inspiration from the British linguist Henry Sweet and in turn provided insights of great importance to the principal figure of the London School, J. R. Firth. Firth took Malinowski's concept of the ‘context of situation’ as the basis of his own contextual theory of meaning. Its fundamental insights arose from Malinowski’s research on difficult-to-access languages which foreshadowed later ‘pragmatics’, and which Malinowski then proposed were applicable as well to English and other European languages. Convinced of the complementarity of disciplines such as ethnology and philology, the anthropologist Malinowski questioned basic assumptions of the linguistics of the inter-war period. Firth’s frequent acknowledgments of Malinowski’s original insights are accompanied by efforts to spell out the differences between them.