Malinowski, Bronislaw K. (1884–1942)

Bronislaw Malinowski was a Polish‐born scholar. He followed ideas coming from Frazer, Durkheim, Freud, James, Mach, Mauss, Marett, and Wundt, but fundamental to the understanding of Malinowski's thought is the theory of needs. The functionalist (but also utilitarian and pragmatist) Malinowski is not only an informed and precise theorist, as he appears in A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays ; many of his ideas also come from practical fieldwork undertaken between 1914 and 1918 in New Guinea and especially in the Trobriand Islands, of which there is extensive documentation in Argonauts of the Western Pacific , as well as in North America in 1926 (where he made a research visit to the Hopi Indians) and – during the 1930s – in Africa. According to him, the Oedipus complex is not universal, and (against the diffusionist and evolutionist approaches) his functionalist (and physio‐psychological) point of view is that religion seems an uncommon phenomenon among the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands. He is in favor of the application of the methods of science to the data of culture. However, he speaks of “savages” and manifests some racist evaluations.