Malinowski, Bronislaw (1884–1942)

The Polish-born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski was a professor at the London School of Economics and an early exponent of extensive systematic field research and empathetic study of small-scale traditional societies. He was a pioneer of the functionalist approach to anthropology, in which society is seen as serving the biological and psychological needs of its members, the individual becoming the focus of anthropological study rather than institutions.

Born on April 7, 1884, to parents of upper-middle-class standing in Krakow, Poland, then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Malinowski early on determined to follow in the footsteps of his father, a professor of folklore at Jagiellonian University in Krakow. At Jagiellonian, Malinowski studied mathematics and physical sciences, receiving a doctorate in 1908. Shortly thereafter, as Malinowski later recounted, he read James Frazer's The Golden Bough, and his interests immediately shifted to the study of religion and culture. He ventured first to Leipzig University to study psychology under Wilhelm Wundt and then, in 1910, to the London School of Economics (LSE), where he undertook advanced studies in anthropology under C. G. Seligman and Edward Westermarck and became a lecturer in 1913.

The pivotal point in Malinowski's career came in 1914, when he traveled to the western Pacific for what was to have been a relatively brief expedition. The advent of World War I prevented his return to England until 1920. During that time, Malinowski spent 6 months among the inhabitants of the island of Mailu, off the southeast coast of New Guinea, and then a total of 26 months in the Trobriand Islands, about 100 miles (1 mile = 1.609 kilometers) northeast of New Guinea. Malinowski [Page 744]became the first European anthropologist to live day in and day out among the subjects of his study, observing firsthand the lives and routines of the Trobrianders. Though the field methods that he developed were anthropological, Malinowski was interested not merely in rituals and customs but in the feelings and motivations that guided an individual's daily actions. He also noted that the Trobrianders employed magic, not as “primitive science” but as a response to frustrated desires.

The result of his fieldwork was the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), a work that secured his reputation as the leading anthropologist of his generation. He spent the next two decades at the LSE, when, in 1939, he accepted visiting lecturer appointments in the United States. World War II once again prevented his return to England. He died on May 16, 1942, in New Haven, Connecticut. His later works included Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926); Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927), which owed much to Malinowski's interest in applying Freudian psychoanalytic theory to non-Western cultures; A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944); and Magic, Science, and Religion (1948).