Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski

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Malinowski (credit: Courtesy of the Polish Library, London)

(born April 7, 1884, Kraków, Pol., Austria-Hungary — died May 16, 1942, New Haven, Conn., U.S.) Polish-British anthropologist. He is principally associated with studies of the peoples of Oceania and with the school of thought known as functionalism. After taking degrees in philosophy, physics, and mathematics in Poland, Malinowski happened upon James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and went to study anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (1910 – 16). Doing research in the Trobriand Islands, he lived in a tent among the people (see Trobriander), spoke the vernacular fluently, recorded "texts" freely on the scene as well as in set interviews, and observed reactions with an acute clinical eye. He was thus able to present a dynamic picture of social institutions that clearly separated ideal norms from actual behaviour and in doing so laid much of the basis for modern anthropological field research. He taught at the London School of Economics (1922 – 38) and Yale University (1938 – 42). He wrote several works that are now considered classics of anthropology, including Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Magic, Science and Religion (1948).

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The Austrian-born British social anthropologist Kaspar Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) founded the functional school of anthropology. He stressed the pragmatic functioning of human institutions within a culture.

Bronislaw Malinowski was born on April 7, 1884, in Cracow, then in a part of Poland belonging to Austria. His father was a professor of Slavic languages. Bronislaw attended Cracow's King John Sobieski public school and the Jagellonian University, earning in 1908 the doctoral degree in physics and mathematics. While ill he read Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, which turned his interest to anthropology. Brief study at the University of Leipzig under Karl Bücher and Wilhelm Wundt was followed in 1910 by further study in anthropology at the London School of Economics under C. G. Seligman and Edward Westermarck. He first lectured at the University of London's School of Economics in 1913. There he earned the doctor of science degree in 1916, was appointed reader in anthropology in 1924, and held the university's first chair in anthropology in 1927. He also lectured in Geneva, Vienna, Rome, and Oslo. He married Elsie Rosaline Masson in 1919. She died in 1935, leaving three daughters. He later married Anna Valetta Hayman-Joyce.

During visits to the United States, Malinowski studied the Pueblo Indians in 1926 and lectured at Cornell University in 1933; at Harvard University's tercentenary in 1936 he received an honorary doctoral degree. In 1939, when World War II erupted, he was teaching at Yale University and was chairman of the board of exiled members of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Malinowski died in New Haven, Conn., on May 14, 1942.

As a commanding figure in modern anthropology, Malinowski was famous because of his skillful lectures and influential writings. His command of languages included Polish, Russian, German, French, English, Italian, and Spanish, as well as the languages of tribal groups he studied. He attracted students with various career goals, particularly colonial civil servants, and trained and directed the field research of a generation of social anthropologists. He encouraged beginning students but was often intentionally devastatingly critical as they became more advanced. The most able responded with greater effort and often with self-assertive anger mixed with admiration and devotion.

Malinowski emphasized the function of such cultural characteristics as custom, ritual, religion, sexual taboos, institutions, ceremonies, and beliefs. In focusing on these and other cultural factors as functional parts of a nicely balanced system, he founded the so-called functional school of social anthropology and helped transform speculative anthropology into a modern science of man. A New York Times obituary called him an "integrator of ten thousand cultural characteristics" to whom students flocked, "enthralled by his command of his material."

Further Reading

Studies of Malinowski include Max Gluckman, An Analysis of the Sociological Theories of Bronislaw Malinowski (1949), and Raymond Firth, ed., Man and Culture: An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski (1957). His career is recounted in Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man (1961). A detailed critique of his theories is in Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture (1968).

Additional Sources

Malinowski, Bronislaw, A diary in the strict sense of the term, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1989.

Malinowski, Bronislaw, Malinowski among the Magi: The natives of Mailu, London; New York: Routledge, 1988.

Malinowski, Bronislaw, The story of a marriage: the letters of Bronislaw Malinowski and Elsie Masson, London; New York: Routledge, 1995.

Malinowski between two worlds: the Polish roots of an anthropological tradition, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

1884-1942

Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski, a British anthropologist, was born on April 7, 1884, in Krakow, Poland, and died on May 16, 1942, in New Haven, Connecticut. The only son of a Slavic professor of philology, Malinowski completed a doctorate in the philosophy of science at the University of Krakow in 1908. After reading the work of James G. Frazer, he turned to anthropology. In 1910 he settled in Great Britain, where he studied with Charles G. Seligman and Edvard Westermarck at the London School of Economics.

During the First World War, although the Australian authorities considered him an enemy alien, he was still allowed to conduct ethnographic research and worked for a period of twenty months in the Trobriand Islands (Melanesia, to the east of New Guinea). At Seligman's request, he studied the Oedipus complex and other manifestations of the unconscious in a community based on maternal law.

In a series of articles, some of which appeared in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1951) and The Sexual Life of Savages in Northwestern Melanesia (1962), he claimed that for the Trobriand people, "sex, in and of itself, was not subject to any form of restriction." There was no period of what Freud referred to as pregenital or anal-erotic interest. "Any idea of consanguinity or paternal parenthood, conceived as a physical relation between father and child, is completely foreign to the indigenous mind." "The desire is to marry the sister and kill the maternal uncle." On the basis of these findings, Malinowski contested the universal validity of Freudian claims and denounced "the failure, even the explicit aversion, of psychoanalysts to seriously consider social organization."

As Ernest Jones and Géza Róheim were quick to point out, Malinowski's claims were not supported by a close examination of his own ethnographic data: A number of taboos, especially that of speech, influenced the sexuality of the Trobriand Islanders. Several convergent indices led to the conclusion that they understood physiological parenthood. A conventional Oedipal triangle seemed to be present: the son was the first to be suspected of killing the father through witchcraft. Malinowski himself acknowledged that he was unfamiliar with the psychoanalysis he relativized and criticized. He was unaware of the distinction between the latent and the manifest, and directly questioned the native population about the incestuous content of their dreams. Moreover, his writing can be questioned in terms of his peculiar mental equations, which the posthumous publication of his Diary in the strict sense of the term (1967) allows us partially to reconstruct.

The head of the so-called functionalist school, Malinowski benefited from his considerable fame: He held the first chair of anthropology at the University of London, which was created for him in 1927. Even in the early twenty-first century, his Trobriand Island work is presented by anthropologists as a key moment in intensive ethnography (prolonged residence, knowledge of the language). His theoretical perspectives have largely been abandoned, but a number of anthropologists continue to refer to his work to refute the universality of the Oedipus complex and the ability of psychoanalysis to account for the workings of the psyche in variable social contexts.

Bibliography

Malinowski, Bronislaw. (1951). Sex and repression in savage society. New York: Humanities Press. (Original work published 1927) ——. (1962). The sexual life of savages in northwestern Melanesia: An ethnographic account of courtship, marriage, and family life among the natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. (Original work published 1929) ——. (1967). A diary in the strict sense of the term. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Pulman, Bertrand. (1991). Psychanalyse et anthropologie. Revue internationale d'histoire de la psychanalyse, 4, 425-521.

Spiro, Melford. (1982). Oedipus in the Trobriands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

—BERTRAND PULMAN