Writing his Life through the Other:

The Anthropology of Malinowski

Last year saw the works of Bronislaw Malinowski father of modern
anthropology enter the public domain in many countries around the world.
Michael W. Young explores the personal crisis plaguing the Polish-born
anthropologist at the end of his first major stint of ethnographic immersion in
the Trobriand Islands, a period of self-doubt glimpsed through entries in his
diary the most infamous, most nakedly honest document in the annals of
social anthropology.
Truly I lack real character. [Nie jestem naprawd prawdziwym charakterm]. With
these words, written on 18 July 1918, Polish-born Bronislaw Malinowski abruptly
ended the intimate diary that he kept during his final stint of fieldwork in the
Trobriand Islands of eastern New Guinea. This diary, along with several others, was
discovered in his Yale University office after his death. Written in Polish, it is clear
that he had not intended it for publication. Against his daughters wishes, however,
and to the dismay of many colleagues who had heard rumours of its controversial
contents, his widow published a translation under the title A Diary in the Strict Sense
of the Term (Routledge 1967). It would become the most infamous, most nakedly
honest document in the annals of social anthropology. With its moral struggles, its
Dostoevskian moods, its Conradian allusions, its Freudian subtext of mother-love
and frustrated sexual desire, its misanthropic and racist outbursts,
the Diary abundantly revealed some unpleasant aspects of Malinowskis character.
In unmasking his personal weaknesses and prejudices it appeared to give the lie to
his professional image as an empathetic fieldworker whose methodological slogan
was participant observation. In short, its publication created a minor scandal and
helped precipitate the crisis of anthropological conscience that anticipated the
postmodern turn in the discipline. The damage to Malinowskis reputation was only
fully restored after the passing of his pupils generation with a dawning realization
that the Diary was an iconic text that pointed the way towards a more self-aware and
reflexive anthropology.

Malinowski was one of the most colourful and charismatic social scientists of the
twentieth century. A founding father of British social anthropology between the two
world wars, his quasi-mythical status has fascinated his disciplinary descendants
who continue to measure themselves against his achievements. Marching under a
self-styled theoretical banner of Functionalism, Malinowski revolutionized
fieldwork methods, cultivated an innovative style of ethnographic writing, and
mounted polemical assaults on a wide array of academic disputes and public issues.
By the time of his death, aged 58, in the United States in 1942 he was a
controversial international celebrity, a cosmopolitan humanist who dedicated his
final years to the ideological battle against Nazi totalitarianism.
It is for his corpus of ethnographic writings on the Trobriand Islanders, however,
that Malinowski is revered and best remembered. Most of his books remain in print
and continue to be taught, critiqued, and studied as exemplars of anthropological
modernism. His best ethnographic writing is a stylistic confection of vivid
description, reflexive anecdote, methodological prescription and theoretical aside.
Malinowski broke with convention by abandoning the positivist pretence of aloof
scientific objectivity by inserting a witnessing self into his narrative. The
Ethnographer of his books is a somewhat outlandish character (a Savage Pole in
one guise) who never allows his reader to forget that not only was he present at the
scene as a participant observer, but that he is also the one, in a fully contextualized
first-person sense, who is doing the writing. Malinowskis ethnographic persona
curious, patient, empathetic yet ironic was given a tentative outing in his first
ethnographic report, The Natives of Mailu (1915) and reached full maturity
inBaloma (1916), a monograph-length essay on Trobriand religion. The intrusion of
Malinowskis authorial self blurred the distinction between Romantic travelogue and
ethnographic monograph. In Ethnography, the writer is his own chronicler, he
reminds us, and scolds those whose works offer wholesale generalizations without
informing the reader by what actual experiences the writers have reached their
conclusion.
Malinowskis first and most celebrated Trobriand monograph, Argonauts of the
Western Pacific (1922), is a richly-illustrated account of the ceremonial exchange of
manufactured shell valuables through which the Trobriands are linked to other
island groups of eastern New Guinea. A colourful scientific

travelogue, Argonauts takes its readers on a canoe-borne voyage around the socalled Kula Ring of islands. The authors Introduction (which has been dubbed the
Book of Genesis of the fieldworkers Bible) contains twenty-five of the most
influential pages in the history of social anthropology.
Malinowskis intention was to raise ethnographic fieldwork to a professional art.
The essential rule, he emphasized, was to study the tribal culture in all its aspects,
making no distinction between what is commonplace, drab or ordinary and what
may seem novel, astonishing or sensational. The ethnographers main task is to
observe and describe customs in their everyday social contexts and to elicit peoples
explanations for their own behaviour. The ultimate aim of social or cultural
anthropology is to convert knowledge of other modes of life into wisdom:
Though it may be given to us for a moment to enter into the soul of a savage and
through his eyes look at the outer world and feel ourselves what it must feel to him
to be himself yet our final goal is to enrich and deepen our own worlds vision, to
understand our own nature and to make it finer, intellectually and artistically. In
grasping the essential outlook of others, with the reverence and real understanding,
due even to savages, we cannot but help widening our own.
As an Enlightenment project, the Science of Man must lead to tolerance and
generosity, based on the understanding of other mens point of view. And
Malinowski famously defined the final goal of the Ethnographer: to grasp the
natives point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.
Following Argonauts, he published Crime and Custom in Savage Society(1926), a
short but path-breaking book which described how law and order was maintained
in the Trobriands through various sanctions, including the threat of sorcery. His
insights into the working of the principle of reciprocity in everyday exchanges and
his pioneering use of the case method laid the foundations of legal anthropology.
Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) contested Freudian dogma concerning
the universality of the Oedipus complex. Malinowski proposed that the matrilineal
configuration of the Trobriand family cast a boys mothers brother rather than his
father in the role of resented authority figure, and his sister rather than his mother as
the object of a boys incestuous desire. Although Freudians did not take kindly to
this interpretation, Malinowski triggered a debate which continues to this day.

The Sexual Life of Savages (1929) is a long and detailed ethnography of Trobriand
family life: courtship, marriage, divorce and death, pregnancy and childbirth.
Malinowskis explicit descriptions of sexual behaviour including as depicted in
folklore and fantasy only narrowly escaped censorship, and for several years the
cellophane-wrapped volume was hidden under bookshop counters. While avoiding
pornography, it mounted a subversive assault on late Victorian prudery; in the
changing mores of the time it had a liberating appeal along with the writings of
Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley and D.H. Lawrence. Needless to say, it was a
pioneering study of human sexuality and of the social and cultural factors which
shape it.

Details from pages 340 and 341 in Malinowskis The Sexual Life of Savages (1929),
showing the kind of sexual explicitness which shocked many and nearly had the
book banned Source.
Malinowskis last classic work on the Trobriand Islands, Coral Gardens and their
Magic (two volumes, 1935) dealt exhaustively with horticultural practices and their

ritual embellishments, with the politics and mythological basis of land tenure, and
with the enchanting poetics of magic. The second volume was an important
theoretical contribution to anthropological linguistics, but it was ahead of its time
and the linguistic profession in America greeted it coolly for its unfashionable
concern with semantics. Malinowski believed it was the best work he had produced
and he dedicated it to his ailing wife who had assisted him throughout his early
writing career. Sadly, Elsie died just weeks before its publication. Coral
Gardens had cost him the most time, effort and expense, and although Malinowski
regarded it as his personal favourite, he suspected it was cursed. Widely and quite
favourably reviewed, it nevertheless sold fewer copies than any of his other books.
In addition to his Trobriand monographs, Malinowskis oeuvre includes several
other full-length works in English, influential enough in their time but esteemed
rather less today. The Family among the Australian Aborigines(1913) was a library
thesis for which (together with the Mailu report) he was awarded a Doctor of
Science degree by the University of London. At the time of death he had four books
in preparation, all of which were published posthumously: Freedom and
Civilization (1944); A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays (1944); The
Dynamics of Culture Change (1945), and (with Julio de la Fuente) The Economics
of a Mexican Market System(1982). Malinowskis numerous published pamphlets,
lecture series, essays and articles both academic and popular need not be
mentioned here, nor is there need to list the Trobriand books he had planned and set
aside or the unfinished anthropology textbook he had promised to more than one
publisher. Suffice to say that had he lived longer he would surely have produced
more notable works to add further lustre to an already illustrious publishing career.
Let us return to that fateful day in the Trobriand Islands, 18 July 1918, when
Malinowski penned his last diary entry. What could he have meant by his selfcastigation? From a later perspective, he would have had every reason to feel
pleased with himself. His foundational fieldwork was almost complete, the
groundwork of his subsequent career laid. He would soon leave New Guinea and
return to Australia with his ethnographic riches (laden with materials as a camel, as
he put it in his dairy); he would marry his fiance Elsie Masson; and when the war
in Europe was over he would return to England to establish his brilliant career at the

London School of Economics as a scholar, author, teacher, pundit, and founder of a

modernist school of anthropology. Why, then, did he bemoan his lack of character?
Any attempt to answer this question must take his own methodological cue and
review the context of situation in which found himself when he wrote that final
entry. Five weeks earlier news had reached him, after an interval of several months,
of the death in distant Cracow of his beloved mother. He was wracked by grief and
guilt; he fell into a state of metaphysical instability in which he felt cut adrift
from all life around him. A few weeks later he received another blow in the form of
a letter from Nina Stirling, his erstwhile sweetheart and muse in Adelaide, whom he
had been stringing along for more than a year, having lacked the moral courage to
tell her that he was now in love with Elsie Masson, the woman he proposed to
marry. Inevitably, Nina had discovered his deception and wrote to terminate their
friendship. His damnable lack of character had been exposed. I feel an absolute
brute & unworthy of anyones friendship, not to speak of love, he wrote to Elsie.
Both young women were daughters of eminent scientists with knighthoods, and
Malinowski had managed the love triangle so badly that he feared the scandal would
ruin his career. His remorse over Nina compounded his remorse over his mother. He
regressed. At night, sad, plaintive dreams, like childhood feelings. Everything
permeated with Mother.
The final diary entry as a whole little more than a page is a meditation on loss
and death. It is populated with memories of his Polish childhood, of his school
teachers in Cracow and his relatives in Warsaw, above all of his mother, and his
betrayal of their last evening together in London by seeking the company of a
mistress. His own extinction seemed possible now: to go to Mother, to join her in
nothingness. Yet at moments he felt it was only the death of something within him:
my ambitions and appetites have a strong hold on me and tie me to life. I shall
experience joy and happiness (?) and success and satisfaction in my work, he wrote.
The last thoughts he recorded were of his childhood, his mother and his father (who
had died when he was a boy and who is mentioned nowhere else in the diary). And
he remembered others who had vanished from his life: his former mistress Annie
(now living in South Africa), his best friend Sta Witkiewicz (back in war-torn
Warsaw), and his spurned girlfriend Nina (at home in Adelaide). It was the

conclusion of an experiment in self-creation that had failed: Truly I lack real

character.
What did Malinowski mean by character? In a recent letter to Elsie Masson he told
her why he believed keeping a diary was so absolutely indispensable to him. It
required of him a daily inspection of his conscience and his character, the better to
monitor his moods and control his moral lapses: I think character might be
defined as persistence of the same real self in one person, he wrote.
Keeping a diary had been an intermittent, decade-long experiment in self-analysis
that he had begun in the Canary Islands and was now bringing to an end. He wrote
his diary to ransack the contents of his mind, to consolidate his character, to remind
himself daily who he wanted to be: an efficient, healthy, single-minded, integrated
person. But the diary portrays a man who is utterly fragmented and divided, a
hostage to his impulses and passing moods. The pathos of this portrait is redeemed
by the authors unremitting honesty. He has no secrets from himself, and he
eventually comes to accept that his quest for a single identity is hopeless, rendered
all the more impossible after Freuds revelations.
His closing sentence, then, is a moral judgment upon himself that can be explicated
in these terms: I have failed to integrate myself, to create a unitary self with a solid,
dependable core. I am an assortment of conflicting needs, a multitude of opposing
selves, an aggregation of wants and desires, some sordid, some sublime, but none
constant or true. After all, I am only human.

Michael Young, an anthropologist trained by students of Malinowski at the Universities of

London and Cambridge, has done fieldwork in eastern Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. As
well as his works on Malinowski, he is the author of several anthropological monographs.
He is currently a Research Associate in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian
National University.