Reading The Golden Bough turned a sickly Polish philosopher into anthropology's great fieldworker
Bronisław Malinowski started out studying mathematics and physics in Kraków. Illness, travel and one book by James Frazer sent him to the Trobriand Islands, where years of living among islanders produced a classic on the Kula exchange ring. Decades after his death, his private fieldwork diary caused a scandal of its own.
Malinowski was born in Kraków in 1884, then part of Austrian-ruled Galicia, into the Polish minor nobility. His father taught Slavic philology at the Jagiellonian University. A frail child but a strong student, he passed his school exams with distinction in 1902 and entered the university to study mathematics and physical science. A serious illness, possibly tuberculosis, shifted him toward philosophy, and he took a doctorate in 1908 with a thesis on the principle of the economy of thought.
Health trips took him to places including Finland, the Canary Islands and North Africa, and three semesters in Leipzig put him under the economist Karl Bücher and the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. Then Frazer's The Golden Bough convinced him to become an anthropologist. From 1910 he studied at the London School of Economics with mentors such as C. G. Seligman and Edvard Westermarck, published a book on the family among Aboriginal Australians in 1913, and in 1914 sailed for Australia.
Several years in the Trobriand Islands and elsewhere in Melanesia and New Guinea led to Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922. Its account of the Kula ring, an elaborate system of ceremonial exchange, became a cornerstone of later thinking about reciprocity. His writing on method popularised participant observation. Theoretically he argued that institutions exist to meet basic human needs, a psychological functionalism set against A. R. Radcliffe-Brown's focus on how institutions serve society as a whole.
As lecturer and then chair at the LSE he drew crowds of students and shaped British social anthropology. Visiting America when the Second World War began, he stayed and joined Yale, dying there in 1942. In 1967 his widow, Valetta Swann, published his field diary, whose self-absorbed and ethnocentric tone has been debated ever since.
Source: Bronisław Malinowski
