Malinowski, Bronislaw K.(1884–1942)

Abstract

Bronislaw K. Malinowski and Alfred R. Radcliffe‐Brown are generally regarded as the “founding fathers” of British social anthropology. Born in Cracow, then part of the Austrian province of Galicia, Malinowski studied natural sciences, mathematics, and later psychology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University where his father had been an eminent professor of Slavonic philology and folklore. In his formative years the main intellectual influence on Malinowski, apart from his father's linguistic and ethnographic interests, appears to have been a combination of the philosophical current of “second positivism” – in his doctoral dissertation Malinowski analyzed the idea of “the economy of thought” in the epistemological works of Mach and Avenarius – and the neo‐romantic movement of Polish cultural modernism (Ellen et al. 1990; Young 2004: 3–127). After graduating in 1908, Malinowski went to Leipzig, where he studied with Wundt, the founder of the so‐called Völkerpsychologie , and with the economic historian Bücher. In 1910 he moved to England, enrolled at the London School of Economics (LSE), and immersed himself in anthropology. Apart from his teachers at LSE (Seligman and Westermarck), Malinowski developed his ideas in critical response to and through ecletic use of the works of Frazer, Rivers, Durkheim, and Freud, among others. During World War I, despite being an enemy alien in Australia, Malinowski was allowed to carry out fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, located northeast of New Guinea. The results of this research were published in the book Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), which contained a detailed analysis of the intertribal exchange system known as Kula and which established Malinowski's international fame as an anthropologist. His ethnography of the Trobriand Islands was later complemented by The Sexual Life of Savages in North‐Western Melanesia (1929) and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935). Upon his return to England he became a reader and in 1927 a full professor of anthropology at LSE, also playing a major role in the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures. A charismatic personality and highly gifted in promoting and popularizing the cause of anthropology, Malinowski recruited a remarkable international body of talented young scientists for his famous seminars at LSE (e.g., Firth, Evans‐Pritchard, Mair, Richards, Fortes, Nadel, Hofstra, Powdermaker, Kuper), many of whom went on to hold important posts in and outside the British Commonwealth. Malinowski spent the last years of his life at Yale University, where he died in 1942.