A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term by Bronisław Malinowski

As a child he was frail, often suffering from ill health, yet he excelled academically. His father was a professor, and his mother was the daughter of a landowning family. Malinowski was born on 7 April 1884, in Kraków, Poland, then part of the Austro-Hungarian province known as the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, to an upper-middle-class family. His approach to social theory was a brand of functionalism emphasizing how social and cultural institutions serve basic human needs, a perspective opposed to Radcliffe-Brown's Structural functionalism that emphasized the ways in which social institutions function in relation to society as a whole. He was also widely regarded as an eminent fieldworker and his texts regarding the anthropological field methods were foundational to early anthropology, for example coining the term participatory observation. His ethnography of the Trobriand Islands described the complex institution of the Kula ring, and became foundational for subsequent theories of reciprocity and exchange. Here he stayed the remainder of his life, also influencing a generation of American anthropologists. From 1933 he visited several American universities and when World War II broke out he decided to stay there, taking an appointment at Yale. Evans-Pritchard, Hortense Powdermaker, Edmund Leach, Audrey Richards and Meyer Fortes. Among his students in this period were such prominent anthropologists as Raymond Firth, E.E. He took posts as lecturer and later as a chair in Anthropology at the LSE, attracting large numbers of students and exerting great influence on the development of British Social Anthropology. Upon his return to England after the war he published his main work Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) which established him as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe of that time. The Australian government nonetheless provided him with permission and funds to undertake ethnographic work within their territories and Malinowski chose to go to the Trobriand Islands, in Melanesia where he stayed for several years, studying the indigenous culture. Marett, but as World War I broke out and Malinowski was an Austrian subject, and thereby an enemy of the British commonwealth, he was unable to travel back to England. In 1914 he was given a chance to travel to New Guinea accompanying anthropologist R.R.

įrom 1910, Malinowski studied exchange and economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) under Seligman and Westermarck, analysing patterns of exchange in Aboriginal Australia through ethnographic documents. He has also been referred to as a sociologist and ethnographer. Bronisław Kasper Malinowski / ˈ b r ɒ n ᵻ ˌ s w ɑː f ˈ k æ s p ər ˌ m æ l ᵻ ˈ n ɒ f s k i/ ( Polish: 1884–1942) was a Polish anthropologist, one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists.

A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term by Bronisław Malinowski