A Defense of Malinowski and His Legacy

There is a widespread penchant to attack and undermine the individuals — mostly men — who pioneered the field of anthropology. Indeed, in the aftermath of the postmodern turn, dethroning icons is the preferred sport of many intellectuals and academics. In the discipline of anthropology, many have leveled their critical gaze at Bronislaw Malinowski, the man who single-handedly codified the ethnographic method we use today. To make those critics’ negative assessment a bit more challenging, here I describe the enduring value of Malinowski’s contribution to anthropology and to social science as I see it.

Here is Malinowski and some of the Trobriand Islanders that he lived with for several years. This photograph is from 1918.

First and foremost, like no anthropologist or social scientist before him, Malinowski solidified our disciplinary commitment to the ethnographic method. He described and codified the value of that toolkit, and clearly delineated its mission for the succeeding generations of anthropological practitioners. So above and beyond whatever other contributions others may see, it was Malinowski who gave us the four methodological parameters that, to this day, still serve anthropologists as a veritable right-of-passage into our social scientific guild — to spend at least a year immersed in the culture you wish to understand; to live away from your own kind; to participate in commonplace and everyday activities in the cultural world you’re exploring; and to gather verbatim quotes so that member of that culture might themselves explicate their cultural world in the ethnographies we pen. 

Atop those parameters, he also fleshed out the holistic nature of the social anthropologist’s objective. There was a practical aspect to these proclamations — anthropologists should be attentive to the ‘skeleton’ of a given society, the metaphor he used for a given society’s particular social organization. We ought to also be attentive the “body” or “flesh” of that society — to the nature of everyday life, and to the pedestrian activity that fills people’s days. And then we should be attentive to the “mind” of that society — to the ideas, narratives, stories, understandings, and values that define it and differentiate it from other cultures elsewhere on the planet. It was these sustained and comprehensive objectives for data-gathering that concerned his many students: they complained that Malinowski’s aspirations for them were too cumbersome and too demanding.

These practical aspects of the data collection process shouldn’t obscure the deeper philosophical frontiers that, under Malinowski’s leadership, anthropology began to explore in the aftermath of his work. Consider that the demand for anthropologist be attentive to the skeleton, body, and mind in a given social group was the conceptual and methodological premise to the cultural relativism that began to percolate into the discipline’s core principles. For the first time, the methodological toolkit used by anthropologists was configured around understanding the interior life-world of a singular cultural group. Malinowski was key and vital in shifting our attention to individual cultural groups, and to each culture’s historically particular path to the present. 

Let’s think briefly about what anthropology and ethnography looked like prior to Malinowski. Certainly it’s true that Boas was busy in the field, and was consistently nudging anthropology in the same directions as Malinowski. But Boas was a devoted empiricist, and amidst the frantic impulses integral to the mission of salvage ethnography, Boas never found the time or focus to distill the methodological nature of the ethnographic toolkit that he too began to explore in this era. So Malinowski successfully distilled and broadcasted those methods in ways that reverberate into the present more than a century later. We might usefully compare Malinowski’s recommendations with the field-practices of Aurel Krause as well — the geographer who, with his brother, was funded to live and write about the Tlingit people in 1883. There, he moved from place to place, wrote down plenty of key information, but had no sense of the value of the “everyday life” that preoccupied Malinowski and most ethnographers who followed him. 

Alfred Cort Haddon, the organizer and leader of the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait, and a pioneer in the institutionalization of anthropology.

It’s also true that Alfred Cort Haddon and the Cambridge Expedition to the Torres Strait preceded Malinowski’s time (internment?) on the Trobriand Islands, and there is lots to admire about the methodological forays taken by the expedition members. Indeed, the Cambridge Expedition is also exemplary of a vision of ethnography as a team science, which differs in important ways from the individualistic enterprise the resulted from Boas and Malinowski’s guidance, and would persevere to the present. Haddon’s perspective on anthropology’s central mission remained tethered to the social evolutionary framework that characterized the discipline in the 19th Century, although his work is perhaps notable for its regionalistic focus (Urry 1998,203-205) — a regionalism that served as a stepping stone to the historical particularism that Malinowski and Boas would concretize. 

Some portion of the critiques leveled today against Malinowski and the disciplinary forebears like him can be attributed to the contemporary imagination of that era. These first anthropologists were almost always men, and they wore pith helmets and colonial gear as they sought to understand the non-literate cultures on the margins of the colonial systems that organized the map of that day. But the coincidence of these colonial empires with the birth of anthropology is frequently overplayed by critics: in Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski explicitly criticizes colonial agents for their obliviousness to the tapestry of cultural difference to be encountered just off the colonial verandah. Even the Cambridge Expedition at the end of the 19th Century was criticized by colonial administrators for stirring up troublesome ideas and understandings amongst the native people the team sought to study. The idea that colonization and anthropology were content bedfellows is an unfortunate rumor, and one very much tied to thin understandings and little scrutiny of the documentation these early anthropologists bequeathed us. 

Another ream of criticism levied against Malinowski arrived after the publication of his diaries. While resident in the Trobriand Islands, and calculated as an enemy of the crown for his Polish citizenship, Malinowski kept a lively journal. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific, he maintains the notion that anthropology is an objective social science, that the anthropologist must endeavor to rid himself of the biases and understandings that he brings to any analysis, and that the goal of impartiality should mark all ethnographic work. He asked that his journals never be published, but after he died, his estate agreed to publish the journals for the first time. Here we get to see all of the passions, foibles, frustrations, derision, and anxiety that he successfully weeded out of the ethnography he would eventually produce about his time in the Trobriand Islands. After the publication of these diaries, a group of moralistic scholars sought to essentially “cancel” Malinowski for the things he omitted from his ethnography, for the thoughts he wanted to keep to himself, for expressing things in conversation with himself that, today, we find unacceptable in the public sphere. 

I might conclude this brief essay mostly about Malinowski with a discussion of the ceaseless penchant for attacking the icons of our discipline, or simply tarnishing the previously untarnished forebears that helped us clamber to the perch where we sit today. In the article that heralded the arrival of political ecology as an interdisciplinary field of enquiry, my mentors Tad Park and Jim Greenberg lamented the “intellectual deforestation” that seems to precede every intellectual effort in contemporary academia. While certainly there is always room for critique in our epistemological progress, I think this penchant for intellectual deforestation is also a measure of the poor of the ideas that others have to offer the public sphere. In the social scientific model of progress, ideas and analyses build on the achievements that came before them. In the model delivered to us by the humanities, the narratives, paradigms, and understandings we’ve inherited are merely appeals to power, and there is no energy that scholars can feed on other than the inertial energy of the institutions and ideas we’ve inherited from the past. I think much of the animosity directed at Malinowski and many others like him is just that — we attack the giants of yesteryear for attention in the present. And buried here is a fascinating postmodern conundrum: the better the set of ideas, the more appealing that a particular understanding or theory might be, the more ire it draws from critics in the postmodern aftermath, for that cannibalism is the only source of energy the deconstructionists perceive.   

Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands