A Scientific Theory of Culture

Abstract

BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI, born in Poland, died three years ago at the early age of fifty-eight. Besides carrying out detailed and exceptionally brilliant field-work in Melanesia and New Guinea and for shorter periods in Australia, East Africa and Mexico, as professor of anthropology in the University of London, and attracting to himself a large number of able students, he displayed throughout his life the keenest interest in developing the theoretical background of his subject. His well-known theory of culture, presented by him in this volume in its finally elaborated form, has been for many years before his anthropological colleagues and has met alike with acceptance and with severe criticism. It is couched in terms of 'functionalism'; and by 'function' he means "the satisfaction of human needs". Even 'basic' human needs (for example, those of hunger and sex) demand cultural satisfaction; and they become linked up with new, 'derived', cultural needs. Any analysis of culture, he says, "in which we attempt to define the relation between a cultural performance and a human need, basic or derived, may be termed functional" (pp. 38, 39). A Scientific Theory of Culture And other Essays. By Bronislaw Malinowski. Pp. ix + 228. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press; London: Oxford University Press, 1944.) 18s. 6d. net.