Bronislaw Malinowski

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Bronisław Malinowski, around 1930
Memorial plaque on house Waldweg 3, in Oberbozen

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (born April 7, 1884 in Cracow , Austria-Hungary , † May 16, 1942 in New Haven , USA ) was a Polish social anthropologist . Coming from a Polish aristocratic family, later living in England, he is now considered one of the founders of British functionalism . Throughout his life he was in a scientific competition with his "rival" Alfred Radcliffe-Brown . His influence on North American cultural anthropology and on the sociological theory of the institution ( Helmut Schelsky ) in Germany was significant.

Life

Malinowski was the son of the Krakow linguist Lucjan Malinowski . When he was thirteen years old, his father died. In his youth he received strong influences from Ernst Mach , a scientifically oriented philosopher , and from linguistics .

In 1902 he began studying philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow . His doctoral thesis from 1906 dealt with the economy of thought following Ernst Mach. In 1908, Malinowski received his degree in mathematics , physics and philosophy from the Jagiellonian University with the predicate Sub auspiciis Imperatoris . From 1908 to 1910 he studied three semesters at the University of Leipzig and then from 1910 to 1914 anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE). He was a student of CG Seligman . He experienced the outbreak of war in Melbourne , where he was attending a conference. As an Austro-Hungarian citizen, he was not interned thanks to his good relations, but he was also unable to return to Europe. Instead, he organized research expeditions and spent six months in 1915 on Mailu, a small island off the south coast in eastern New Guinea. In 1915/16 and 1917/18 he visited the Trobriand Islands , where he carried out intensive field research, from which he lived his life. During his time in Australia, Malinowski met the Scottish professor's daughter Elsie Rosaline Masson, whom he married in 1919. From 1920 he traveled with his wife frequently and lived in South Tyrol from 1923 before moving to London in 1929.

From 1922 to 1938 he taught himself at the LSE, and from 1927 he held a chair in anthropology. His main students were Audrey Richards , Edward E. Evans-Pritchard , Talcott Parsons , Sir Raymond Firth , Phyllis Kaberry , Isaac Schapera , Hilda Kuper, and Monica Wilson . Jomo Kenyatta wrote his master's thesis with him, which was published in 1938 under the title Facing Mount Kenya with a foreword by Malinowski. He experienced the outbreak of World War II in the USA, where he often stayed. He did not return to Europe, but took a professorship at Yale University .

Malinowski was a very extroverted person and loved the hype that was made around him. His work Argonauts of the Western Pacific became a bestseller far beyond the boundaries of specialist anthropological circles .

plant

Malinowski made a clear distinction between social anthropology and history . In his view, a cultural phenomenon in the present should not be explained in terms of history, but must be explainable on the basis of its current function for the culture in question. He also dealt with the then very popular psychoanalysis around Sigmund Freud . In particular, Malinowski checked the theses that Freud had put forward in his work Totem and Tabu . Like Margaret Mead after him, he referred to the intercultural differences between sexual and other important social relationships (parent-child relationships, etc.) and warned against projecting Freud's findings onto cultures outside of Europe.

He is considered the "father of field research " as it has become the core of empirical work in anthropology today. Malinowski propagated field research stays with close contact with the informants over a long period of time. For him , field research means participatory observation : the researcher shares the everyday life of the people he researched over a longer period of time and observes them in the process.

Malinowski reacted violently to the activities of the missionaries, whose mostly tendentious records were for a long time one of the most important sources for ethnology. Instead, he saw ethnology called upon to preserve the native culture of the locals, thereby revealing his own romantic motifs at the same time.

Argonauts of the western Pacific

The book "Argonauts of the Western Pacific", published in 1922, is considered to be Malinowski's main work. It begins with an introduction to the method of field research, followed by a geographical description of the Trobriand Islands and a narrative of his arrival on the island.

In further chapters he describes in detail the phenomenon of the kula exchange , which he discovered in the horticultural Trobrianders. In the final part of the book he tries to explain the meaning and function of Kula for the Trobrianders. He attaches particular importance to explaining the phenomenon from within and from the perspective of the Trobrianders and not to succumb to the Eurocentrism of “certain other researchers” (he is referring to Alfred Radcliffe-Brown ).

The Sex Life of the Wild in Northwest Melanesia

In his second important work on the Trobriander, the book published in 1929 on "The Sexual Life of the Wild in Northwest Melanesia ", Malinowski describes in detail the social organization of sexuality, including social rites, choice of partner and sexual behavior of the Trobrianders.

He is impressed that sexuality is not being suppressed - as in Central Europe - but is part of people's everyday life. For example, so-called youth houses were available to the young people, where they could try out their sexuality in a playful way. This has been promoted by the entire community and seen as an important step in growing up. He compares his observations with Sigmund Freud's ideas about the development of sexuality.

In further chapters he goes into the parent-child relationships among the Trobrianders and describes in detail their complex matrilineal kinship structure in which biological paternity was ignored and instead the mother brother (uncle on the mother's side) a "fatherly" relationship (along with a whole series of obligations) to his sister's children.

Publications

  • 1913: The Family Among the Australian Aborigines
  • 1915: Wierzenia pierwotne i formy ustroju społecznego. Pogląd na genezę religii ze szczególnym uwzüdnieniem totemizmu . (Primitive beliefs and forms of the social system. Outlook on the emergence of religion with special consideration of totemism)
  • 1922: Argonauts of the Western Pacific. An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea. Dutton, New York 1922. ( Internet Archive ).
    • German edition: Argonauts of the western Pacific. A report on the activities and adventures of the natives in the island worlds of Melanesian New Guinea. Syndicate, Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-8108-0087-2 . (Translator: Heinrich Ludwig Herdt. Editor: Fritz Kramer ).
  • 1924: Maternal family and Oedipus complex. A psychoanalytic study . Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Leipzig 1924. ( Internet Archive ).
  • 1926: Crime and Custom in Savage Society.
  • 1927: The Father in Primitive Psychology .
  • 1927: Sex and Repression in Savage Society . (Gender and repression in primitive societies. Hamburg 1962)
  • 1930: The Sex Life of the Wild in Northwest Melanesia. Love / marriage and family life among the natives of the Trobriand Islands / British New Guinea; an ethnographic representation. Grethlein, Leipzig / Zurich 1930.
  • 1935: Coral Gardens and Their Magic. A Study of the Methods of Tilling the Soil and of Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands (Coral gardens and their magic. Soil cultivation and peasant rites on the Trobriand Islands) ISBN 3-8108-0172-0
  • 1944: A Scientific Theory of Culture . (A Scientific Theory of Culture).
  • 1967: A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term . German: A diary in the strict sense of the word: New Guinea 1914–1918 , Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1986
  • Magic, Science and Religion and other writings German 1973, 1983.

See also: field research , ethnology , cultural anthropology, and social anthropology

literature

  • Timothy Raison (Ed.): The Founding Fathers of Social Science . London: Scolar Press 1979.
  • Giulio Angioni : Tre saggi sull'antropologia dell'età coloniale . Palermo: Flaccovio 1972.
  • Wolfgang Marschall (ed.): Classics of cultural anthropology: from Montaigne to Margaret Mead . Munich: CH Beck 1996.
  • Peter Marwedel: Functionalism and domination: the development of a theory concept from Malinowski to Luhmann . Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein 1976.
  • Guido Sprenger: Eroticism and Culture in Melanesia - A Critical Analysis of Malinowski's 'The Sexual Life of Savages' . Hamburg: LIT 1997.
  • Fritz Stolz: Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski (1884–1942) , in: Classics of Religious Studies. From Friedrich Schleiermacher to Mircea Eliade. Published by Axel Michaels , Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1997, 3rd edition 2010, ISBN 978-3-406-61204-6 , pp. 247-263.
  • Michael Young: Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884-1920 . Yale University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-300-10294-1

Web links

Wikibooks: Sociological Classics / Malinowski, Bronislaw  - learning and teaching materials
Commons : Bronisław Kasper Malinowski  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ the text of the application in English translation: Roy F. Ellen, Malinowski between two worlds: the Polish roots of an anthropological tradition , Cambridge University Press 1989, ISBN 0-521-34566-9 [1] .
  2. ↑ Text online.
  3. ↑ PDF file.
personal data
SURNAME Malinowski, Bronislaw
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Malinowski, Bronisław Kasper (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British social anthropologist, founder of British functionalism
DATE OF BIRTH April 7, 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH Krakow
DATE OF DEATH May 16, 1942
Place of death New Haven (Connecticut) , USA