Malinowski, Bronislaw (1884–1942)

Bronislaw K. Malinowski dominated British social anthropology, the comparative sociology of “primitive” societies, between the two world wars. Promoted under the banner of functionalism, his pioneering methods of field research, seminal writings, and inspirational teaching revolutionized the discipline. Among the many theoretical contributions Malinowski made to anthropology (most of them today taken for granted) was his innovative approach to the study of “primitive law”; indeed, he was a founding father of legal realism.

Born into a class of impoverished gentry in Cracow, Austrian Poland, Malinowski studied philosophy, mathematics, and physics at the Jagiellonian University. As a sickly child and youth, his highly cultivated mother introduced him to extensive travel and he soon developed a taste for the exotic, a facility for learning foreign languages, and a cosmopolitan outlook. Although possessed of immense intellectual energy, physical ill health dogged him throughout his life.

In 1910, following a year at Leipzig University, Malinowski enrolled at the London School of Economics as a graduate student of ethnology and primitive sociology under the supervision of C. G. Seligman (1873–1940) and Edward Westermarck (1862–1939). A self-confessed Anglophile, he came under the influence of other leading British anthropologists, notably Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), W. H. R. Rivers (1864–1922), and Alfred Haddon (1855–1940). [Page 982]Despite the outbreak of war in Europe and his compromised status as an enemy alien, officials allowed Malinowski in August 1914 to proceed with his plan to do fieldwork in the Australian colony of Papua (former British New Guinea). During the course of two years in the Trobriand Islands, he reaped the ethnographic rewards of living right among the natives and mastering their vernacular. Intensive fieldwork in this participatory mode became the hallmark of British anthropology, although Malinowski's posthumously published field diaries debunked the myth of his relaxed and friendly rapport with his subjects.

Following his return to England with his ScottishAustralian bride, Malinowski taught at the London School of Economics. Appointed Foundation Professor of Social Anthropology in 1927, he traveled widely on lecture tours in Europe, Africa, and the United States. He became a British subject in 1931. As a pundit and publicist, Malinowski wrote, lectured, and broadcast on many social and political issues of the day, such as birth control and gender issues, religion and race relations, and warfare and totalitarianism. While he was on a sabbatical year in the United States, war broke out again in Europe, and he decided to remain in the United States for its duration. In 1940–1942, he taught anthropology at Yale (as a legal realist, he engaged constructively with the law faculty) and spent two summers doing fieldwork in Oaxaca, Mexico. He died of a heart attack, at the age of fiftyeight, soon after his appointment to a permanent professorship at Yale.

As a charismatic and challenging teacher, Malinowski trained a generation of anthropologists in his Socratic seminar. A volatile and passionate man, he inspired intense loyalty or incited strong antipathy in his students. Established in key academic posts in Britain and elsewhere, the most talented of his disciples gave social anthropology its distinctive intellectual profile.

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