9 British Social Anthropology 1922-1957

Prefatory Note

The literature on the history of British social anthropology is thinner than that on American cultural anthropology, especially in regard to diversity and inclusion. Owing to that, this chapter focuses on the canonical writings of two famous social anthropologists: Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. Regarding diversity, we can say that Jomo Kenyatta, the first President of the independent nation of Kenya, earned his PhD in social anthropology with Bronislaw Malinowski, and we can note that Malinowski, like Franz Boas in the United States, advanced the careers of a significant number of female anthropologists in the 1920s and 1930s. The selected dates require some comment. 1922 was the year the two founders of social anthropology (Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown) published their first major work. 1957 was the year Ghana declared political independence from the British empire. During the 1960s, as the empire transitioned into the British Commonwealth, British social anthropology experienced an acute identity crisis.

You may also notice an imbalance favoring the work of Bronislaw Malinowski, particularly his reinvention of ethnography. That also reflects accessibility. Radcliffe-Brown’s writing was largely in the area of kinship studies, which requires significantly more preparatory work to master.

1. Introduction: 20th century Social Anthropology in Britain

Unlike American cultural anthropology, which expanded outward from Franz Boas’s program at Columbia University in New York City,  20th century British social anthropology reflects the merger of two distinctive intellectual traditions led by two quite different thinkers: Bronislaw Malinowski and Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. Most of the leaders of the next generation of British anthropologists generally studied with both of them in sequence, with Malinowski in charge from 1922 to 1937, and Radcliffe-Brown from 1937 to 1946. From the end of World War Two until the end of the British colonial empire, British social anthropology was a blend of their approaches.

Like the Boasians, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, and their students believed that 20th century social anthropology represented a sharp break with the prior century. They admitted little in the way of 19th century precedent. The evolutionary stage models favored by Morgan, Tylor, and McLennan, as well as the Scottish practice of conjectural history, were sharply denounced. Their position was that efforts to understand the past would always be speculative, and the only firm facts were those that could be directly observed in living human communities. As you might expect, British social anthropologists tended to ignore archaeology. They also ignored physical anthropology. The division between these fields was evident from 1922 forward. For the most part, British universities that emphasized social anthropology had weak connections with archaeologists and physical anthropologists, and they were frequently housed in separate departments. Somewhat curiously, perhaps, although Malinowski had a significant interest in human biology and diet, physical anthropology was never part of his students’ preparations, and Malinowski had nothing interesting to say about Darwin. Rather than a holistic unit, in Britain, social anthropology was understood as a sister field to sociology.

1.1 Differentiating Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown

Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown had a penchant for using the same words to label different ideas. This makes it easy to be misled. For example, both claimed to be functionalists. But they meant quite different things. For Radcliffe-Brown, the concept of function was paired with that of structure, and together they expressed an organic unity by analogy to the study of the anatomy and physiology in living organisms. The task of structural analysis was thus to describe social anatomy, and the job of functional analysis was to describe social physiology. Much like a pre-med course of their era, social anthropology was the study of anatomy and physiology.  But the resemblance was mostly metaphorical. In practice, social anatomy came down to the study of how kinship shaped social structure, which in turn created social dynamics. Topics of central interest including inheritance, political succession, marriage, and political alliances.

Malinowski’s references to functionalism meant something entirely different. He had no interest in analogies to social anatomy and social physiology, and very little interest in kinship, especially when it involved diagrams. Having a background in physics and advanced mathematics, he deprecated kin diagrams as the “bastard algebra of kinship.” For Malinowski, functionalism referred to an ethnographic objective: developing a rich synchronic description of a living community, that demonstrated the holistic integration of myriad cultural features. Good ethnography included art, ritual, myth, and magic, technologies, housing and subsistence, as well as status and politics. Kinship and marriage were not eliminated, but they were not the center of interest.

There are many additional differences, which we will note in passing.  Most notably, Malinowski made his reputation as a legendary fieldworker whose long term research in the Trobriand Islands – which lasted several years – had no precedent in British anthropology. He was celebrated as an ethnographer, a figure of mythical proportions. His ethnographic work between 1914 and 1918 provided fuel for the remainder of his career. He published on a variety of topics, but all of his work built on his Trobriand research.

Radcliffe-Brown, in contrast, was by nearly all accounts a very poor fieldworker. And while he did publish some ethnography, accusations of plagiarism followed him in relation to all of his lengthier works. But if he was not a fieldworker, he excelled as a model builder and typologist, and his strongest work analyzed ethnographic data collected by other researchers. He took complex, messy ethnographic details, and developed clean, simple models. And while many contemporary anthropologists insist that Radcliffe-Brown got almost everything wrong about both kinship in general and in specific societies, most would also agree that this does not detract from his contribution. If Lewis Henry Morgan invented kinship in the 19th century, Radcliffe-Brown reinvented it in the 20th century. As a result, his influence on 20th century British social anthropology was second only to Malinowski.

2. Radcliffe-Brown and the (re)Invention of Kinship

Alfred Reginald Brown (1881-1955) came into this world without a hyphen in his name. Early in his career he was known simply as Alfred Brown, the patronym of his father. But after struggling for two decades to establish himself professionally, in 1926 he took the occasion of a teaching appointment in Sydney, Australia to restore his mother’s maiden name, and his own middle name. From that point forward he was known as Alfred Reginald Radcliffe-Brown. It had a certain aristocratic sheen, an impression he increased by carrying a cane and wearing a top hat. His academic star rose steadily thereafter.

Alfred Brown was born in the working class city of Birmingham in England’s industrial north. His father. a civil servant, died when he was young, and Brown was raised in a female headed household. Added support came from his elder brother – who held a bureaucratic position in the colonial service in South Africa – perhaps explaining the importance he placed on sibling solidarity in his writings on kinship. Owing to fraternal support and his own ability and ambition, Brown was admitted in 1905 to Trinity College at Cambridge University. There he became the first university trained anthropologist in the United Kingdom.

At Cambridge he studied with William Halsey Rivers-Rivers (yes, the hyphen is correct!) If Radcliffe-Brown was the first university trained anthropologist, then Rivers was one of the last self-made adventurer scholars in anthropology. Rivers had initially earned a medical degree, but after studying psychology, he developed a deep interest in color perception. At the turn of the century Rivers joined the fabled Torres Strait Expedition to Melanesia. He emerged an anthropologist. His Melanesian adventure convinced Rivers to place kinship at the heart of a new field he called social anthropology (Langham, 1981). Brown followed in Rivers footsteps, and the study of kinship would remain his core focus for the remainder of his career. As Brown gained professional prominence, British social anthropology itself became the study of kinship and marriage.

2.1 “He’s No Gentleman” – The Peripatetic Mr. Brown

By some accounts – which are significantly in error – field research is the foundation of a career in anthropology. It is an error, because there are numerous exceptions to this supposed rule, and among them we can count Radcliffe-Brown. His two major field expeditions, funded by Cambridge University, ended with slender results. Despite this, he eventually managed to publish two major works. The Andaman Islanders came out in 1922, ten years after that expedition ended. And nearly two decades after his fieldwork in Australia, he self-published a collection of papers in the journal Oceania – a journal that he both founded and edited. In 1931 the papers were collected to form a slender volume titled The Social Organization of the Australian Tribes. In both cases, there were rumors that he pilfered the work of local fieldworkers who lacked formal education and university affiliations, and presented their work as his own. In the Andaman Islands case, he pilfered the work of a missionary with long residence in the islands, while in the Australian outback he victimized a hardworking researcher named Daisy Bates. In the second case, he offered to  look over Bates manuscript and notes, and then returned to Cambridge. He kept her notes for several years. When he finally returned them, they were cut into ribbons – an analytical method that today is called grounded theory and applied often to field notes. But there was no copy, and for Bates her notes were now entirely unusable. It seems clear that his work on Aboriginal social organization was based on her notes, but Brown never acknowledge her. Bates seems to have good reason to remark that Brown was no gentleman.

After his field work in Australia and the Andaman’s concluded – prior to 1914 – Brown traveled across the British empire, taking relatively obscure teaching positions. He taught for four years in Tonga, and five more in Cape Town, South Africa, where he published a paper on the mother’s brother in an exceedingly obscure journal (Radcliffe-Brown, 1924). The paper was based on the ethnographic work of Henri Junod, but Radcliffe-Brown reinterpreted Junod’s findings in a novel manner and acknowledged his source by questioning Junod’s interpretation of his data. In 1926, aged 44, he found himself back in Australia, teaching in Sydney. It was during his stay in Sydney that he changed his name, founded Oceania, and self-published his papers on Aboriginal kinship systems. His sources remained vague – leading readers to presume he relied on his own field notes. But his work proved extraordinarily interesting on a conceptual level. At age 50, after decades in relative obscurity, Radcliffe-Brown was offered a temporary appointment at the University of Chicago, as a replacement for Edward Sapir. The appointment lasted six years. At Chicago he collected a significant following of graduate students who would later make significant contributions both to British social anthropology and to American cultural anthropology, and he worked out his conceptual system.

Radcliffe-Brown’s 15 minutes of fame arrived in 1937, when he was appointed Chair at Oxford University. For the next decade he would teach students he inherited from Malinowski – who in his turn had relocated to the United States. This period resulted in major collective works, edited volumes that highlighted the work of students who studied with both Radcliffe-Brown and Malinowski, including Edward Evan Evans-Prichard (a born aristocrat, who was later Knighted as Sir Edward Evans-Prichard), Meyer Fortes, Lucy Mair, and Audrey Richards. Their work was published in two edited volumes as African Political Systems (to which Radcliffe-Brown contributed a short but influential Preface) and African Systems of Kinship and Marriage (to which he contributed an 85 page introduction that remains the fullest statement of his system). During his short decade at Oxford, he influenced a generation of British social anthropologists who would dominate studies of kinship and marriage for several decades. But for Radcliffe-Brown, the joy was short lived. In 1946 he reached age 65 and was forced to take mandatory retirement. Lacking the financial resources to really retire, he once again set out around the world, accepting temporary visiting positions until his death.

2.2 The Natural Science of Society: Classifying Systems of Kinship and Marriage

Radcliffe-Brown repeatedly made two proposals regarding social anthropology. First, he argued that social anthropology was a natural science of society, and by natural science he meant an endeavor in classification. Much as taxonomists in biology classified plants and animals, social anthropologists worked out classifications of human societies. For reasons we will consider next, Radcliffe-Brown argued that social anthropologists were specialists in societies lacking state institutions. In these societies the social structure was based on kinship and marriage. Following Rivers, he put much effort into developing a technical vocabulary that would capture classificatory differences.

For example he held that the basic units of societies without states were descent groups (patrilineages and matrilineages, and patriclans and matriclans). These in turn reflected two basic systems of descent: matrilineal systems traced descent through a female line, giving rise to matrilineages, while patrilineal systems traced descent through a male line, giving rise to patrilineages. Descent was about ancestry, but it was also about inheritance and social identity. Marriage systems could likewise be classified, as monogamous (two spouses), polygynous (multiple wives), or polyandrous (multiple husbands). Marriage practices could be exogamous (outside the clan or lineage) or endogamous (within the clan or lineage). Similarly, post-marital residence patterns – where a couple would live after marriage – could be classified as either patrilocal (living with father’s clan or lineage), matrilocal (living with mother’s clan or lineage), or avunculocal (mother’s brothers clan). The result of his work was a conceptual framework whose ultimate objective was creating a clear, orderly classificatory system. He had little interest in causation or explanation beyond noting the logical fit of these systems (e.g., patrilineal descent -> patrilineages > patrilocal residence). Generations of anthropology majors have memorized these terms, and they continue to be taught today. In retrospect – of one reads the detailed monographs – the actual practices are difficult to capture with this vocabulary, and considerably more interesting.

2.3 On the Sociology of Primitive Societies

Radcliffe-Brown’s second proposition was that social anthropology was a branch of sociology. Sociology proper studied industrial societies like Britain, who had left behind traditional ways. Social anthropologists were also sociologists, but they studied stateless societies.The latter were modern, the former were primitive. This raises a contentious point.

Despite their rejection of 19th century social evolution, it would be wrong to state that British social anthropologists viewed all human societies as co-temporal, and living in the same historical moment. Under the influence of Radcliffe-Brown, social anthropology was premised on a division between primitive and modern societies. The key to the distinction, according to Radcliffe-Brown, was that primitive societies were stateless. Being stateless, they were organized by kinship and marriage. Thus sociologists studied modern industrial societies and their traditional antecedents, and social anthropologists studied societies that – lacking a state – were small-scale, and organized by kinship and marriage. Primitive societies were thus kinship-based societies.This approach, of course, ought to require a careful definition of the word state. What is a state, and what does it mean not to have one?  But little attention was given to these questions. And given a push, the criteria were those familiar since the 19th century: in stateless societies, there were no bureaucracies, taxes, codified laws, armies, aristocracy, or systems of writing. Stateless societies were also assumed to be small in scale, with a population numbering in the low thousands. But this was not true, even of the societies described in the African Systems volumes. There were African societies that very clearly had state level institutions – including Ghana. And there were stateless societies that with populations above 100,000 people.

More problematically, British anthropologists worked in the British empire, and thus there was always an imposed, external, colonial state. And thus, realistically, one might say sociologists studied the colonial powers, while anthropologists studied the peoples they had colonized.

But despite the fact that a quarter of the world was incorporated into the British empire, social anthropologists argued that traditional, kinship-based, stateless way of life could still be directly observed, and treated as autonomous entities. Like Boasian cultural anthropology, social anthropology was an endeavor in salvage ethnography: an effort to document disappearing ways of life. It was not, tellingly, an effort to help them break free from colonial rule and survive. The British social anthropologist Adam Kuper recently captured this sentiment especially well:

The original sin of anthropology was to take for granted that there were two diametrically opposed types of human society: the civilized and the primitive. Anthropology defined itself initially as the science of primitive society. This was a very bad mistake (Kuper, 2010: 123).

With the practical end of the British empire during the 1960s, the idea that the societies studied by social anthropologists were in any way primitive collapsed. Suddenly, anthropologists had to make themselves useful to their hosts. The recent history of the field largely reflects this reorientation. During the 1970s, the differences between social anthropology and cultural anthropology largely disappeared, and teaching in the United States became a regular part of English academic careers. A new label appeared – sociocultural anthropology.

You might be wondering: why did we give so much attention to Africa? In point of fact, British social anthropologists worked all around the empire, and later sociocultural anthropologists in almost every society on the planet (barring extreme political barriers – e.g., there are no ethnographic studies of North Korea). But the answer to the question is this. Malinowski worked in the Trobriand Islands, a small archipelago in Melanesia. But his students mostly worked in Africa, owing to funding he received from the Institute for African Studies. In inheriting those students, Radcliffe-Brown inherited their field work. To Malinowski we now turn.

3. Bronislaw Malinowski and the (re)Invention of Ethnographic Fieldwork

In 1884, Bronislaw “Bronio” Malinowski was born in the beautiful, historic city of Kraków, in what today is Poland. However, between Malinowski’s birth and his departure for England in 1910, Poland did not exist as an independent nation. It was partitioned among Germany, Russia, and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Poland existed culturally, but not politically, an arrangement that Malinowski was later to recommend to the world as a whole. Kraków was in the Austro-Hungarian sector, and the political and cultural focus was Vienna. Unsurprisingly, German thinkers were a major influence.

Although Malinowski’s family had social prestige, they were quite poor. His mother descended from land-owning nobility, but she inherited no property. His father earned meager wages as a school teacher until his passion for Polish folklore led to an appointment to the faculty at Kraków’s famed Jagiellonian University. His father’s appointment was short-lived, however, and he died while Bronio was a child. Thus, Malinowski – like Radcliffe-Brown, the other founder of 20th century British social anthropology – grew up in a single parent household headed by his mother. Bronio escaped isolation, because the faculty of Jagiellonian University doted on him, and as a young man he became a recognized figure in the Polish avant-garde, spending time with rising young artists and writers in resorts in the nearby Tatra Mountains. He was something of a national intellectual hero, receiving a medal from the Archduke of Austria-Hungary for the quality of his doctoral dissertation. Despite acclaim in Poland, Bronio left Kraków for London in 1910, and never returned to Poland beyond a few brief visits to his mother. As it happened, nearly the entire faculty of Jagiellonian University was executed by the Nazi’s after the German invasion of Poland in 1939.That same year Malinowski left Britain for Yale University in the United States. He died several years later, in 1942 at the young age of 58, perhaps of a broken heart.

Most anthropologists became aware of Malinowski in 1922, after the publication of his famous ethnography, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Malinowski , 1922). His study was based on fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands – northeast of Australia. Unlike most ethnography at the time, his field work spanned several years. This was, in truth, something of an accident of history. Malinowski arrived in Melanesia in 1914, the year the First World War broke out. By citizenship he was an enemy alien, as Austria-Hungary fought alongside Germany. He was, essentially, trapped in Melanesia in a British colony for the duration of the war – though he was allowed short trips to Australia, which led to romance and marriage. At the end of the war in 1918, he returned to London, championing the method of long term participant observation. He urged his students to plan long sojourns, to become fluent in the local language, and to mix with the people. Owing to his influence, long term participant observation, preferably for two to three years, became the core method of British social anthropology. In the United States, by contrast, research was usually limited to the summer break. Margaret Mead favored work that could be concluded in a few weeks or months, and Boas came to rely on correspondence with Native field workers who he trained in relevant methods. It was not until the 1950s that spending a full year became the norm in American anthropology.

Argonauts made Malinowski the most influential figure in British social anthropology. From 1922 until 1937, Malinowski was British social anthropology, and aspiring social anthropologists crowded into his seminars. Argonauts is still widely recognized as one of the best works of ethnographic writing in English, establishing a new level of expression. It blends evocative narrative, closely observed scenes, factual detail, and synthetic interpretations. In addition, it is compelling writing, carefully executed. Indeed, Malinowski is sometimes referred to as “Anthropology’s Conrad” because of his mastery of English narrative (in explanation, Joseph Conrad – also a Polish expatriate – arrived in London a decade before Malinowski, established himself as one of the foremost authors in British literature, with works like his 1899 classic Heart of Darkness).

After the fall of communism in Poland in 1989, Malinowski again gained recognition as a Polish national hero – at least among intellectuals and anthropologists. New  studies of his early writings – in Polish and German, and thus previously unknown to Anglophone anthropologists – show that much of his thinking was shaped before he emigrated to London. German thinkers – particularly the philosopher of science Ernst Mach and the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche – had a formative influence. Malinowski was fascinated by the way all of the pieces of a local way of living fit together, and he was convinced that most cultural institutions had a purpose or a  “function” that could be identified by taking a holistic perspective focused on how the parts supported a larger whole. He was disdainful of efforts to reconstruct history and preferred to focus on what was available for observation in a living community. His distinctive approach to anthropology, it turns out, was formed in its essentials long before he ever set foot on a beach in the Trobriand Islands.

That said, his attraction to London was the result of his fascination with the writings of Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941). Frazer penned an enormous compendium of occult writing titled The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion. Malinowski was prone to struggles with tuberculosis, and during one long period away from school, he began reading Frazer. His fascination persisted, leading him to abandon mathematics in favor of anthropology. He was able to persuade Frazer, a living icon of 19th century anthropology, to write the Preface for Argonauts. One widely distributed myth caught his attention in particular – the tale of the Stranger King, who enters an existing kingdom from far away and replaces the sitting king. Malinowski felt that this was close to his relationship with Frazer: Frazer was the King of British anthropology, rooted in evolutionary stages and collected ethnological fragments, which his new functionalist method would replace. As it happened, Frazer very nearly outlived him, and is still widely read by people interested in magic and Wicca today.

Compared to Frazer’s anthropology, and the work of 19th century anthropologists, Malinowski’s work was indeed quite different. He rejected Marx’s economic materialism and his emphasis on social conflict, stressing instead social cohesion and the importance of all aspects of culture. He was much more a liberal cosmopolitan than a revolutionary socialist. Likewise, he had no discernible interest in Darwin. Similar to Boas, Malinowski rejected stage models of human history, and viewed all living humans as his contemporaries and equals. That said, it is troubling that he occasionally used the word savage in his writing. By 1920 it was an insulting term signaling prejudice, without scholarly value. Viewed in context, he seems to have used it for ironic effect, and also as a marketing ploy. With titillating titles like The Sexual Lives of Savages,his books gained a readership far beyond universities, and he badly needed the extra income. Unlike Boas, he had no four-field vision of anthropology, and he expressed little interest in archaeology or physical anthropology. He found anthropometry absurd and distasteful, and never practiced archaeology. He focused his attention on culture, ethnography, and language.

He was, however, fascinated by Freud, and he gained broad recognition for his comparative essays, like The Father in Primitive Psychology, which he critiqued as culture bound and reflective of a patriarchal social structure. In Trobriand society, importantly, the father was not an authority figure. Instead, as a matrilineal society, male authority was avuncular, or vested in the mother’s brothers, and children were thought to be the progeny of their mothers alone, whose pregnancies occurred when spirits of the dead who wished to be reincarnated entered their wombs as they bathed in lagoons.

3.1 Malinowski and Functional Anthropology

No one in anthropology takes Malinowski’s theoretical framework too seriously today. But despite the lack of currency of his theoretical concepts, his argument that theory matters retains its force. Malinowski called his “theory” functionalism. It was quite different from the functionalism of Radcliffe-Brown. Malinowski’s thinking on functionalism is open to dispute because he developed multiple threads in his writings, and he never really brought them together in an orderly manner. There are basically two readings. The first equates functionalism to a theoretical system, the second views it as an injunction to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in a particular way. We will first review functionalism as a conceptual system, and then turn to his views on ethnography. As a conceptual system, Malinowski argued that functionalism came down to three proposals about culture: culture functions to meet the biological needs of individuals; culture is interconnected; and culture can only be understood synchronically.

a. Culture Functions to Meet Individual Biological Needs

When anthropologists talk about Malinowski’s “functional” theory of culture, they usually focus on his argument that most aspects of culture exist because they do something useful for individuals. This builds on a broadly shared meaning of the word “function” in English – function refers to what something does. The function of a shovel, for example, is to dig a hole. Malinowski expanded on this simple idea, arguing that culture functions to meet the biological needs of human individuals.

However, Malinowski’s emphasis on the importance of “individual biological needs” was never worked out in the context of his rich ethnographic writings. It also remained disconnected from any serious study of biology. It certainly wasn’t evolutionary. Indeed, Malinowski was much more interested in Freud than Darwin, and his “functional theory” of biological needs most resembles the work of the psychologist Abraham Maslow (you are probably familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy). Malinowski’s students would later note that he never lectured on a hierarchy of individual biological needs in any of his seminars. This aspect of his work came to light primarily in posthumous publications. It was picked up by many introductions to theory in anthropology, because it seemed to be theoretical.

B. culture is interconnected AND DEMANDS HOLISTIC UNDERSTANDING

The second thread in Malinowski’s functionalist theory centers on the proposal that all aspects of culture, and all parts of social life, are integrated and interconnected. Owing to this, it is impossible to understand any aspect of a culture in isolation. If you are interested in kinship for example, you also need to study how food is produced and distributed, how property is claimed, as well as religious worldviews, political processes, and a dozen other topics. This emphasis on integrated analysis is called in anthropology the Principle of Holism: every bit of culture must be understood in context.

C. CULTURE IS Synchronic

The third thread in Malinowski’s functionalist theory argues that only living cultures can be directly observed. Social life is happening right now, all around us.  Malinowski used the word synchronic to emphasize the focus of his work on concurrent events: social life is happening all around us, he argued, we simply need to get out into the world and directly observe it. His emphasis on synchronicity was part of a widely shared perspective in social anthropology that deprecated the contribution of history, archaeology, and evolution. Malinowski thought the present could be understood on its own, without regard for the past. But in Malinowski’s case, it also reflected the influence of Ernst Mach, whose philosophy of science stressed observing what exists contemporaneous with the observer.

3.2 Malinowski and the (Re)invention of Anthropological Ethnography

There are ways to interpret Malinowski’s “functionalist theory” other than the one above, which amounts to little more than injunctions about the nature of culture. As Maurice Bloch, a leading contemporary British anthropologist, puts it:

Functionalism is … a commitment to seeing culture as existing in the process of actual people’s lives, in specific places, as part of the wider ecological process of life …. It developed together with advocacy for long term field work … and maintaining a focus on … specific and closely watched instances (Bloch, 2005: 16).

Indeed, Bloch argues that “functionalism … is an attitude to theory rather than being a theory” (Bloch, 2005: 17).

Indeed, his functional revolution was developed in the context of his ethnographic research. For Malinowski, synchronic integration meant that fieldworkers could go into a community, and uncover how all the different strands of social existence are woven together. This is, of course, more of a methodological injunction than a theoretical framework, and the same holds for his functional theory. To give it more conceptual heft, Malinowski related synchronic integration to holism: the idea that the whole of social life is greater than the sum of its parts, so we must constantly go beyond any particular element and explore the surrounding context. A large part of what makes Malinowski’s ethnography so compelling is the manner in which he weaves multiple strands together and develops a holistic, integrated analysis of social life through the synthetic accumulation of details.

3.3 On the Native’s Point of View

The most famous injunction in Malinowski’s writings is also the most challenging:  the goal of ethnography is capturing “the native’s point of view” (today we speak instead of the “insider’s point of view”). His vision has motivated thousands of ethnographers to seek an inside perspective on unfamiliar ways of life. But the question of how his focus on the insider’s view of life relates to his holistic view of culture or his insistence that theory matters is rarely asked.

It is important to emphasize that Malinowski was well aware that “the natives” did not share his functional theory. And he was also aware that the way he presented their worldview differed from how they experienced it alone or with one another. This meant that doing ethnography involved something other than becoming an insider – it required developing a method for constructing an inside perspective, from the outside, as it were, constructing a new space for mutual understanding. And this is where theory comes in. The ethnographer uses theory to construct a representation of an “inside” perspective that insiders who are not ethnographers and unaware of that theory will not articulate. Functionalism aspires to create an authentic but independent model of how a way of life is lived and experienced.

4. A Guide to Reading the Introduction to Malinowski’s Argonauts

Malinowski’s Argonauts is now out of copyright, available free from Project Gutenberg. I strongly encourage you to take the time to read the Introduction. A Guide to reading is provided below.

4.1 The Historical Context of Malinowski’s Argonauts

Much historical context has been provided above. But a few additional words may be helpful. Malinowski’s writing often expresses soaring, inspiring sentiments, celebrating human diversity:

Every human culture gives its members a definite vision of the world … it is the possibility of seeing life from various angles, peculiar to each culture, that has always … inspired me …. In grasping the outlook of others, with … reverence and real understanding … we cannot help but widen our own …. The Science of Man in its deepest version should lead us to … tolerance and generosity, based on the understanding of other men’s point of view.

Unfortunately, these sentiments can be more than a little arrogant, and sometimes simply offensive. For example, in the quote above, I removed one phrase:

In grasping the outlook of others, with the reverence and real understanding, due even to savages, we cannot help but widen our own.

In reading the Introduction to Argonauts, you will find occasional phrasings like the one above, that may jar your ear and offend a century after they were written. What are we to make of Malinowski’s intolerant statements? There is no easy answer, and there are a variety of reasonable responses.

Anthropologists in the 1920s were inspired by Malinowski because anthropologists of his era – who shared his vision – were almost the only Europeans who crossed the color line in colonial contexts. Racial segregation was not an American peculiarity. It was the colonial norm on a global scale, and in the early 20th century, nearly the entire world was a colonial possession of a small number of European nations.

When Malinowski writes about abandoning white companions to “pitch his tent among the natives” it can be grating. But it is worth noting that when he did this he violated a social norm that could be violently enforced: “white men” did not live in “native” communities. Coming from Poland, when Poland did not exist, Malinowski had an acute sense of how ethnic differences can be arrayed in a political hierarchy. In Berlin, Vienna, and London, he was marked as a Polish outsider (most of his students were similarly marginalized at the center).

Section I: To Understand the Kula, Look Beyond the Kula

The first section of the introduction to Argonauts introduces the Kula exchange system, an elaborate system for exchanging gifts and building social influence. The Kula system is the focus of the entire book, but in interpreting the Kula and describing how it functioned Malinowski discussed many aspects of Trobriand life that at first seem disconnected from the Kula. It is thus, an empirical application of holistic, integrative functionalism (if you have time some day, return and read the whole book!)

Section II: Ethnographers Should be Transparent

Why does Malinowski argue that ethnographers need to be transparent about how they learn what they know about the communities they study? (Transparency happens far too rarely, including both applied and academic versions).

Section III: The “Ethnographer’s Magic” is a Set of Methods

Most of this section reflects on Malinowski’s early efforts at field work. How did his early work go? However, at the conclusion of this section, Malinowski famously refers to “the ethnographer’s magic” and introduces three “principles of method” that lead to successful work. Identify those three “magical” principles. They will help you work your own ethnographic magic when you do your work.

Section IV: Join in the life of the Community of Interest

Why did Malinowski deem it essential to live among the people you were trying to understand, achieve fluency in their language, and appreciate the complexity of everyday life? It may seem obvious that this is useful, but it continues to be rarely practiced, and in applied work it is often doubted. Nothing about ethnography, in fact, is so questioned by non-anthropologists as the need for participant immersion.

Section V: Work by the Light of Theory

What are Malinowski’s views on theory? Is theory desirable? Necessary? Note this statement in particular: “The fieldworker relies entirely upon inspiration from theory.” How then does a fieldworker avoid preconceptions and biases? (Malinowski has an answer to that question). Much of this section argues that “scientific” fieldwork transforms thinking about unfamiliar ways of life – how? Note that at the end of this section he argues for holistic field work: “the whole area of tribal culture in all its aspects has to be gone over in research”

Section VI – Start Analyzing Data in the Field

The most important take-away from this section is Malinowski’s argument that analysis of the data should start early, while you are still in the field doing research. That remains good advice. He even uses the word iteration, almost a century before it became central to design thinking.

But this section also famously argues that “the natives” cannot articulate the rules of their social organization – “… not … in human mind or memory are these laws to be definitely formulated. The natives obey the forces and commands of the tribal code, but they do not comprehend them.”

This may seem ridiculous – and the way Malinowski expresses it is condescending – but most social and behavioral scientists share this assumption today. It has mostly come to be questioned – ironically – by anthropological ethnographers.

How, then, can an ethnographer develop an insider’s understanding? In answering this, Malinowski discusses what he terms “the method of statistic documentation by concrete evidence.” What is that about? (his spelling of ‘statistic’ was correct at the time).

Section VII Record the Imponderabilia of Actual Life – and Participate

In the prior section, the core method Malinwoski advocated was a kind of survey. Most ethnographers today are allergic to surveys. In Section VII Malinowski argues that only direct observations allow access to “the imponderabilia of actual life” that give “flesh and blood” to ethnographic accounts.”

He also emphasizes combining participation with observation, and notes that doing this can take understanding to a new level – “it is good for the Ethnographer sometimes to put aside camera, notebook and pencil, and to join in himself in what is going on.”

Section VIII Language in Use Holds the Key

In retrospect this section is an early venture in what today is called cultural linguistics or the ethnography of speaking. Malinowski was an early proponent of creating an accurate corpus of texts in the language of the community being studied, and he was one of the very few at the time to stress recording verbatim statements situated in a wide variety of contexts. Most ethnographers of his day wrote out summaries of what they thought people were saying, detached from social life and context (and usually worked with a translator). Malinowski’s argument is that careful documentation of how people use language in context allows an ethnographer to “find out the typical ways of thinking and feeling, corresponding to the institutions and culture of a given community.”

Section IX “The Native’s Point of View” and “the Hold which Life Has”

The concluding section sets out the combination of methods that, taken together, make up ethnography. It also includes one of the most quoted sentences in the history of social anthropology: “… the final goal, of which an Ethnographer should never lose sight …. is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world. We … must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him.”

At this point you should be aware that developing this kind of understanding is not the outcome of conducting an interview, or making an observation, or asking someone to fill out a survey. It is the product of mixing methods – many of which produced “supremely elusive and complex” data, in the context of long-term, authentic participant observation. This is very difficult to do in applied contexts, but Malinowki’s work provides a vision to aspire to.

In his later work Malinowski would continue to emphasize that the data do not speak for themselves. The significance of the evidence has to be “constructed” through analysis and interpretation that is informed by theoretical concepts which reveal otherwise hidden patterns and relations. It is the combination of theory with detailed documentation that makes ethnographic understanding possible.

References Cited

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