Bronisław Malinowski

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (1884–1942) is a Polish-born British-naturalized anthropologist, one of the most important 20th-century anthropologists.

From 1910, Malinowski studies exchange and economics at the London School of Economics under Seligman and Westermarck, analyzing patterns of exchange in aboriginal Australia through ethnographic documents.

In 1914, he is given a chance to travel to New Guinea accompanying anthropologist R. R. Marett, but as war breaks out and Malinowski is an Austrian subject, and thereby an enemy of the British commonwealth, he is unable to travel back to England.

The Australian government nonetheless provides him with permission and funds to undertake ethnographic work within their territories and Malinowski chooses to go to the Trobriand Islands, in Melanesia where he stays for several years, studying the indigenous culture.

Upon his return to England after the war, he publishes his main work Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which establishes him as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe of the time.

He takes posts as lecturer and later as a chair in Anthropology at the LSE, attracting large numbers of students and exerting great influence on the development of British Social Anthropology.

Among his students in this period are such prominent anthropologists as Raymond Firth, E.E.

Evans-Pritchard, Hortense Powdermaker, Edmund Leach and Meyer Fortes.

From 1933, he visits several American universities and when the second World War breaks out he decides to stay there, taking an appointment at Yale, where he stays the remainder of his life, also influencing a generation of American anthropologists.

His ethnography of the Trobriand Islands describs the complex institution of the Kula ring, and becomes foundational for subsequent theories of reciprocity and exchange.

He is also widely regarded as an eminent fieldworker and his texts regarding the anthropological field methods are foundational to early anthropology, for example coining the term participatory observation.

His approach to social theory is a brand of functionalism emphasizing how social and cultural institutions serve basic human needs, a perspective opposed to Radcliffe-Brown's structural functionalism that emphasizes the ways in which social institutions function in relation to society as a whole.

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