Bronisław Malinowski

Dzieła

• 1922Argonauci Zachodniego Pacyfiku

  Monografia o kula, pierścieniu ceremonialnej wymiany, w którym naszyjniki i bransolety z muszli krążą w przeciwnych kierunkach między wyspami u wschodnich wybrzeży Nowej Gwinei; jej wstęp przedstawia metodę długich badań terenowych i obserwacji uczestniczącej.

• 1925Magia, nauka i religia

  Esej dowodzący, wbrew idei „prelogicznej” mentalności ludów pierwotnych, że mieszkańcy Wysp Trobrianda posługują się starannie zebraną wiedzą empiryczną w ogrodnictwie i rybołówstwie, a po magię sięgają tam, gdzie przypadek i niebezpieczeństwo ją przerastają; religia pomaga ludziom w obliczu śmierci i innych kryzysów życia.

Stanowisko

Malinowski is on the map as a founder of modern social anthropology and of the functionalist school. In the introduction to “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” (1922) he described a method: the ethnographer should live for a long time among the people studied, learn their language, record everyday life as well as rules, and aim “to grasp the native’s point of view”. His account of the kula, a ring of ceremonial exchange between islands, showed an economy in which gifts and obligations rather than profit organise exchange; Mauss built on it in “The Gift” (1925), Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” (1944). In “Sex and Repression in Savage Society” (1927) he argued against Freud that the Oedipus complex is not universal, since in the matrilineal Trobriand family tension is directed at the mother’s brother rather than the father. In “Magic, Science and Religion” (1925) he held that Trobrianders possess sound empirical knowledge and use magic where outcomes are uncertain. His late theory, “A Scientific Theory of Culture” (1944), explained institutions as responses to biological and derived needs; Talcott Parsons assessed it in relation to the theory of social systems, while Lévi-Strauss objected that functionalism shuts out history and comparison. His posthumously published diary and the relation of his “practical anthropology” to colonial administration are still debated.

Życie i kontekst

Bronisław Malinowski was born on 7 April 1884 in Kraków, then part of Austrian Galicia; his father was a professor of Slavic philology. He studied philosophy at the Jagiellonian University; his dissertation on the principle of the economy of thought, submitted in 1906, earned him a doctorate with imperial honours in 1908. After three semesters with Wilhelm Wundt and Karl Bücher in Leipzig he went in 1910 to the London School of Economics, where he studied with Edvard Westermarck and C. G. Seligman. In 1914 he travelled to New Guinea; as an Austro-Hungarian subject he became an enemy alien when war broke out but was allowed to continue his research, on Mailu (1914–15) and in the Trobriand Islands (1915–16, 1917–18). From 1921 he taught at the LSE, from 1927 as professor of social anthropology. In 1938 he went to the United States, taught at Yale and died in New Haven on 16 May 1942.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Family among the Australian Aborigines (1913)
• Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
• Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926)
• Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927)
• Coral Gardens and Their Magic (2 vols., 1935)
• A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944)