Bronislaw Malinowski

Examines the social organization of the natives of the Trobriand Islands orf eastern New Guinea with special attention given to their complex trading system

An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea

Argonauts of the Western Pacific

When it was first published (in 1967, posthumously), Bronislaw Malinowski's diary, covering the period of his fieldwork in 1914-1915 and 1917-1918 in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands, set off a storm of controversy. Many anthropologists felt that the publication of the diarywhich Raymond Firth describes as "this revealing, egocentric, obsessional document"was a profound disservice to the memory of one of the giant figures in the history of anthropology. Almost certainly never intended to be published, Malinowski's diary was intensely personal and brutally honest. He kept it, he said, "as a means of self-analysis." Reviews ranged from "it is to the discredit of all concerned that the diary has now been committed to print" to "fascinating reading." Twenty years have passed, and Raymond Firth suggests that the book has moved over to a more central place in the literature of anthropological reflection. In 1967, Clifford Geertz felt that the "gross, tiresome" diary revealed Malinowski as "a crabbed, self-preoccupied, hypochondriacal narcissist, whose fellow-feeling for the people he lived with was limited in the extreme." But in 1988, Geertz referred to the diary as a "backstage masterpiece of anthropology, our The Double Helix." Similarly in 1987, James Clifford called it "a crucial document for the history of anthropology."

A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term

During the First World War the pioneer anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski found himself stranded on the Trobriand Islands, off the eastern coast of New Guinea. By living among the people he studied there, speaking their language and participating in their activities, he invented what became known as 'participant-observation'. This new type of ethnographic study was to have a huge impact on the emerging discipline of anthropology. In Sex and Repression in Savage Society Malinowski applied his experiences on the Trobriand Islands to the study of sexuality, and the attendant issues of eroticism, obscenity, incest, oppression, power and parenthood. In so doing, he both utilized and challenged the psychoanalytical methods being popularized at the time in Europe by Freud and others. The result is a unique and brilliant book that, though revolutionary when first published, has since become a standard work on the psychology of sex.

Sex and Repression in Savage Society

This book presents essays by renowned anthropologist Malinowski, known for his talent to bring together the warm reality of human living with the cool abstractions of science. His pages have become an almost indispensable link between the knowing of exotic and remote people with theoretical knowledge about humankind. This collection offers readers a set of concepts about religion, magic, science, rite and myth in the course of forming vivid impressions and understandings of the Trobrianders of New Guinea.

Magic, Science, and Religion, and Other Essays

Bilimsel Bir Kultur Teorisi

Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands

La vita sessuale dei selvaggi nella Melanesia nord-occidentale

Alexander Goldenweiser

Grafton Elliot Smith

Herbert Joseph Spinden

The Diffusion Controversy

Culture

This classic text examines the extensive and complex trading system maintained by the Trobriand islanders. While the main theme is economics and social organization, the power of magic, mythology and folklore are also examined.

An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea [1922/1994]

Description of the different forms of the Australian family organization; Methods of obtaining wives - Kurnai, Gourditch-mara, Youin, Bangerang, Wotjobaluk, Parkengee, Euahlayi, Wiradjuri, Dieri, Arunta, Warramunga, Binbinga, Anula, Mara, Tjinjilli, Gnanji, Kuinmurbura, Wakelbura [and other places throughout Australia]; Husband and wife relationships - diversity of previous statements and contradictions; Sexual aspects of marriage, punishment for infidelity, discussion on the pirrauru relationship of the Dieri, jealousy; Review of statements made on local groups, property rights, camp arrangements, relationship of the family unit to the tribal and territorial organization; Kinship, conception beliefs, collective ideas which define parental kinship; Examples of kinship ideas suggested by folklore (Central and north Central Aust.); Parental control and childhood, infanticide, life of initiates; Economic life, sexual division of labour, sociological features; Brings together and discusses statements by other authors on foregoing subjects.

A Sociological Study

The Family Among the Australian Aborigines

Buyu, bilim ve din

An Ethnographic Account of Courtship, Marriage and Family Life Among the Natives of the Trobriand Islands, British New Guinea

The Sexual Life of Savages in North-western Melanesia

John Howkins

The main question of our age is how we live our lives. As we struggle with this question, we face others. How do we handle ideas and knowledge, both our own and those of others? What relationship to ideas do we want? Whose ideas do we want to be surrounded by? Where do we want to think? Most choose, or have the choice made for them, according to what family, colleagues, and friends do and say and what we read about, and a more or less rational calculation of the odds. Modern ecology results from the shift in thinking generated by quantum physics and systems theory, from the old view based on reductionism, mechanics, and fixed quantities to a new view based on holistic systems where qualities are contingent on the observer and on each other. This perception changes how people treat ideas and facts, certainties and uncertainties, and affects both art and science. Worldwide it is part of the process of understanding the current crisis in the environment, and the balance of economy, creativity, and control required in our response. The book's starting point is the growing role that information has played in industrial economies since the 1800s and especially in the last thirty years. It is an attempt to identify ecology of thinking and learning. It is also based on the need to escape from old, industrial ways and become more attuned to how people actually borrow, develop, and share ideas. Throughout the book, Howkins asks questions and offers signposts. He gives no guarantee that creative ecologies will be sustainable, but shows what should be aimed for.

Where Thinking Is a Proper Job

Creative Ecologies

Robert Briffault

A Debate Between Robert Briffault and Bronislaw Malinowski

Marriage, Past and Present

In Sex and Repression in Savage Society Malinowski applies his experiences on the Trobriand Islands to the study of sexuality, and the attendant issues of eroticism, obscenity, incest, oppression, power and parenthood.

Bronislaw Malinowski's Miscellaneous Writings

Published, posthumously, this volume is both a summing up and a reformulation of Malinowski's functional theory of culture.

[1944]

A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays

Raymond Firth

Man and Culture. An Evaluation of the Work of Bronislaw Malinowski. Edited by R. Firth. [By Various Authors. With Portraits and a Bibliography.].

Bronislaw Malinowski, born and educated in Poland, helped to establish British social anthropology. His classic monographs on the Trobriand Islanders were published between 1922 and 1935, when he was professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics. This collection of Malinowski's early writings establishes the intellectual background to his achievement, and shows how his considerable impact on twentieth-century thought is rooted in the late nineteenth-century philosophy of central Europe, especially the work of Ernst Mach and Friedrich Nietzsche, and in the ethnological theories of James Frazer.

The Early Writings of Bronislaw Malinowski

Michael W. Young

Malinowski's Kiriwina presents nearly two hundred of Malinowski's previously unpublished photographs of the Islanders among whom he lived between 1915 and 1918. The images are more than embellishments of his ethnography; they are a recreation in striking detail of a distant world.

Bronislaw Malinowski

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