Brownislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

Quotes
“The functional view of culture lays down the principle that in every type of civilization, every custom, material object, idea and belief fulfills some vital function, has some task to accomplish, represents an indispensable part with a working whole.”

Cited in They Studied Man, Kardiner and Preble (1961)

“The anthropologist must relinquish his comfortable position in the long chair o the veranda of the missionary compound, Government station, or planter's bungalow, where, armed with pencil and notebook and at times with a whisky and soda, he has been accustomed to collect statements from informants.... He must go out into the villages, and see the natives at work in gardens, on the beach, in the jungle; he must sail with them to distant sandbanks and to foreign tribes.”

Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926)

Biography and History
Bronislaw Malinowski was born in Kraków, Poland, to Lucjan Malinowski, a professor of Slavic philology at the Jagiellonian University (University of Kraków), and Józefa Łącka, a scholarly woman of a land-owning family. Malinowski received a PhD from Jagiellonian University in 1908. He then attended Leipzig University, where, under the influence of Wilhelm Wendt, and following his reading of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, Malinowski became deeply interested in cultural anthropology. This led him to the London School of Economics, and eventually on to fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands from 1915-1918. Later on, Malinowski would go on to do ethnographic work in the Americas, where he would remain until his death in 1946.

Work
It is his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands that formed the empirical basis for his most famous works, most notably Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). In this book, Malinowski not only describes the circulation of goods in what was called the “kula” ring, he also deals with the way of life in which these exchanges take place, and the common concerns that compel people to use magic. He also distinguishes between ideal and practical behaviour in his ethnography, while attributing rationality to his informants. This was significantly different from the “armchair” anthropology that had been practiced in the past. Malinowski was among the first to argue for doing fieldwork in the sense that it has been traditionally practiced in anthropology: learning the language(s) of the people under study and living with them for an extended period of time by practising “participant observation”. Moreover, Malinowski is attributed the title of founder of the school of “functionalism” in anthropology. Essentially, Malinowski’s view of culture is that it is subservient to basic human needs. To Malinowski, all behaviours which we consider cultural are actually rooted in some universal need that humans have. In short, “participant observation” and “functionalism” remain two of Malinowski’s greatest contributions in anthropology, and both are evident in Argonauts of the Western Pacific.

Influences
Aside from the folk psychology of Wendt, and the ethnography of Frazer, Malinowski was also inspired by Emile Dukheim, and Sigmund Freud. The influence of Durkheim and the French sociological school is perhaps most obvious in Malinowski’s focus on small parts of a whole rather than abstract notions of society. Freud’s influence may seem less obvious, but it still shows in Malinowski’s treatment of culture as being rooted in universal human needs, as well as his interest in Trobriand sexual and emotional life. Malinowski, along with Radcliffe-Brown, started the theoretical trend of British functionalism. Malinowski trained famous anthropologists including Meyer Fortes, Raymond Firth, and E. E. Evans-Pritchard.

Analysis
From the initial context of Malinowski’s research, in which armchair anthropology was the norm, Malinowski found it important to avoid sweeping generalizations without the empirical evidence to back them up. In this sense, Malinowski was trying to be more scientific in the way he conducted fieldwork. It was also in response to the more shallow generalizations of armchair anthropology that Malinowski thought to investigate how all behaviour might be rooted in needs that we might all understand. In the context of World War I British society, national differences were very important: finding ways in which we might realize common ground through culture not only countered stereotypes of the mystical savage, it also provided a cohesive vision of society in which all people fulfilled a vital function.

Critique
Overall, Malinowski’s work has received widespread acceptance, as much as it has been the issue of great dispute. Functionalism became one of the most prominent schools of thought in 20th century social science, receiving serious attention in sociology, psychology and law. The merits of functionalist theory were its ability to give a language to account for part-whole relationships, its ability to account for change (much like the evolutionary perspectives of the past), and, though it perhaps later became a weakness of this perspective, its grounding in universal human needs. Both Malinowskian fieldwork and functionalism became the target of criticism during the “reflexive turn” of the 1970’s and 1980’s (which somewhat also coincided with the publication of the shocking contents of Malinowski’s field diaries). By dealing with supposedly “whole” societies in a bounded environment, functionalism ignores how the boundaries between societies are far from absolute, and it naturalizes boundaries that are bound up in histories of colonialism, racism, and capitalism (notably). Fieldwork in this sense also came under fire for usually being done by middle-class white men in poorer countries that were the former colonies of the countries in which they resided. Moreover, this kind of fieldwork’s fetishization of the local, bounded context inhibited thinking about how these boundaries were constructed and how these localities were already part of global histories. In its most basic form, functionalism also reduces people to mere functions in a cohesive whole, giving the impression that conflict (a key concern for Marxist social thinkers) can only really happen between wholes rather than come from within.