Malinowski's ethnographic photography: Image, text and authority

Abstract

Bronislaw Malinowski's ethnographic work in the Trobriand Islands, Southeast Papua New Guinea, from 1914 to 1918, established fundamental methodologies and presentations in modern anthropological fieldwork. Malinowski's monographs, including Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Coral Gardens and Their Magic, The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwest Melanesia and Sex and Repression in Savage Society, among others, have become ethnographic classics assuming the mythic quality within anthropology. An analysis of Malinowski's major monograph, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) suggests ways in which the act of photographing was an intrinsic part of his ethnographic methodology. The act of visual framing played a seminal role in the formulation of his ethnographic text and in his diary writing. Yet, while Malinowski used photography for fieldwork, his photographs are also suggestive of a more distant stance from native life.