| Bronislaw Malinowski | |
| Born | 7 April 1884 Kraków, Poland, Austro-Hungarian Empire |
|---|---|
| Died | 16 May 1942 New Haven, Connecticut, USA |
| Education | PhD, Philosophy from Jagiellonian University, Physical Chemistry at Leipzig University, PhD, Science from London School of Economics |
| Known for | Father of Social Anthropology |
Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (IPA: [ˌmæləˈnɔfski, ˌmæləˈnɒfski]; April 7, 1884 – May 16, 1942) was a Polish[1] anthropologist born in Austria-Hungary in a region now part of Poland and is widely considered to be one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century because of his pioneering work on ethnographic fieldwork, with which he also gave a major contribution to the study of Melanesia, and the study of reciprocity.
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Malinowski was born in Kraków, Poland, to an upper-middle class family. His father was a professor and his mother the daughter of a land-owning family. As a child, he was frail, often suffering from ill-health, yet he excelled academically. He received a doctorate in philosophy from Jagiellonian University in 1908, where he focused on mathematics and physical sciences. While attending the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Malinowski became ill and, while recuperating, decided to be an anthropologist when reading James Frazer's The Golden Bough. He spent the next two years at Leipzig University, studying anthropology under C. G. Seligman. At the time, James Frazer and other British authors were amongst the best-known anthropologists, so Malinowski traveled to England to study at the London School of Economics in 1910.
In 1914, he traveled to Papua (in what would later become Papua New Guinea), where he conducted fieldwork at Mailu and then, more famously, in the Trobriand Islands. On his most famous trip to the area, he became stranded. The First World War had broken out, and, as a Pole from Austria-Hungary in a British controlled area, Australian authorities gave him two options, to be exiled to the Trobriand islands or face internment for the duration of the war. Malinowski chose the Trobriand islands. It was during this period that he conducted his fieldwork on Kula and produced his theories of Participant observation, which are now key to anthropological methodology.
By 1922, Malinowski had earned a doctorate of science in anthropology and was teaching at the London School of Economics. In that year his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific was published. The book was universally regarded as a masterpiece, and Malinowski became one of the best known anthropologists in the world. For the next two decades, Malinowski would establish the LSE as one of Britain's greatest centers of anthropology. He would train many students, including students from Britain's colonies who would go on to become important figures in their home countries.
Malinowski taught intermittently in the United States, and when World War II broke out during one of these trips he remained in the country, taking up a position at Yale University, where he remained until his death. He died of a heart attack while preparing to conduct summer fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico on 16 May 1942, just after his 58th birthday, and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Connecticut.[2]
Malinowski is renowned as one of anthropology's most skilled ethnographers. He is often referred to as the first researcher to bring anthropology "off the verandah" (also the name of a documentary about his work), that is, experiencing the everyday life of his subjects along with them. Malinowski emphasised the importance of detailed participant observation and argued that anthropologists must have daily contact with their informants if they were to adequately record the "imponderabilia of everyday life" that were 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, 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 definitively 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.
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.
His study of Kula 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 also 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 society as a whole. He reasoned that when the needs of individuals are met, who comprise society, then the needs of society are met. To Malinowski, the feelings of people, their motives, were crucial knowledge to understand the way their society functioned:
Besides the firm outline of tribal constitution and crystallised cultural items which form the skeleton, besides the data of daily life and ordinary behaviour, 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. 25.
Apart from fieldwork, Malinowski also challenged common western views such as Freud's Oedipus complex and their claim for universality. He initiated a cross-cultural approach in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) where he demonstrated that the complex was not universal.