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Malinowski Revisited
Malinowski Revisited
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DOI: 10.1353/con.2014.0008
Access provided by University of Central Florida Library (9 Mar 2016 23:11 GMT)
Crucible or Centrifuge?
Bronislaw Malinowskis A Diary
in the Strict Sense of the Term
Richard Lansdown
James Cook University
The restraints we place on imaginative writersas opposed to discursive ones, in the professionsare essentially few, since freedom
of expression is in the nature of their pursuit and of their value
to society. Tolstoy, for example, argued only that authors should
1. John Ruskin, The Eagles Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art,
Given before the University of Oxford, in Lent Term, 1872 (London: George Allen, 1900).
Configurations, 2014, 22:2955 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press
and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts.
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self emerge and appear out of the sum total of those jottings, however brief they may be.4
By repressing self-consciousness, diaries liberate their authors
from literary artifice. Just as the imaginary presence of a correspondent exercises a restraint on the author and produces a certain sort
of self-consciousness which may be entirely absent from the pages
of a diary,5 so diaries undergo a somewhat disconcerting metamorphosis should they be consciously composed as art.6 As selfdelineations, Robert Fothergill argues, diaries deal directly with
people and events which in the novel are subjected to the stresses
and conventions of art and design. And in many ways they are the
most natural and instinctive product of the art of writingcorallike aggregates of minimal deposits, in fact.7
Clearly, this is an ideal conception. No piece of writing is actually
constructed like coral, instinctively, and artifice is involved with every act of enunciation. But the diary does remain a less teleological
enterprise than either biography or fiction. As the diarist does not
know the future, Anas Nin suggests, he reaches no conclusion,
no synthesis, which is an artificial product of the intellect. The diary is true to becoming and continuum.8 A diary is only secondarily
a text or a literary genre. Like correspondence, the diary is first and
foremost an activity. Keeping a diary is a way of living before it is
a way of writing.9 By being a peculiarly open aesthetic structure,
short of both hindsight and foresight in narrative terms, the keeping of a diary does become a particular kind of experience: a new
stage in self-knowledge and new formulation of responsibility to the
self; an unusually definite image of oneself generated out of the
flux of impressions that compose the consciousness, and therefore
nothing less, perhaps, than a clue to self-mastery.10 From the
4. Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the
Twentieth Century (London: Methuen, 1923), p. 5.
5. Ibid., p. 2.
6. Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge / Kegan Paul,
1960), p. 3.
7. Robert Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 8.
8. Anas Nin, The Novel of the Future (London: Peter Owen, 1969), p. 153 (emphasis in
original).
9. Philippe Lejeune, On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), p. 153.
10. Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (above, n. 6), p. 183; Fothergill, Private
Chronicles (above, n. 7), pp. 64, 68.
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wretched compromise of being too literary [to be true] yet not literary enough [to be aesthetically compelling], the diary becomes the
reconciler between incompatibles, literary enough [to be engaging]
yet not too literary [to stifle spontaneity]. Thus it poses a vital
problem of consciousnesswhat to do with the human capacity to
apprehend aesthetic patterns in experience.11
***
Bronislaw Malinowskis A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term presents these issues in an especially vivid form. It was written in two
bouts, between September 1914 and March 1915, and October 1917
and July 1918the first and last of three pioneering anthropological trips to New Guinea undertaken while the author (a Pole, and
therefore nominally a citizen of Austria-Hungary) was a wartime enemy alien in Australia, the local imperial power. Existentially, the
diary is an intense one, but it is also unusual because of its professional and intellectual circumstance. A Diary in the Strict Sense of the
Term was translated and published in 1967, twenty-five years after
its authors death, and was received by most Anglo-American anthropologists with feelings of disappointment, embarrassment, and
dismay12especially when it was revealed that this founding father of cultural anthropology habitually referred to his Trobriander
subjects as niggers.13 Malinowski also agonized at length about
his romantic attachments to the daughters of two Australian professors (Nina Stirling, whom he had practically affianced himself to,
11. Fothergill, Private Chronicles (above, n. 7), p. 50.
12. Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz, The Ethnographer and His Savages: An Intellectual History of Malinowskis Diary, Polish Review 27:12 (1982), pp. 9298, quote
on p. 94.
13. See Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, 2nd ed., trans.
Norbert Guterman (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 162, 188, 264,
273, for example. Malinowskis stated attitudes on this score are sometimes more distressing when direct terms of racial abuse are not employed. For example, I see the life
of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from
me as the life of a dog; or I understand all the German and Belgian colonial atrocities
(pp. 167, 279; italics indicate Malinowskis use of languages other than Polish in the
original). At other times, language that to modern eyes is powerfully abusive seems
almost affectionate. After I came here, Malinowski wrote to Elsie Masson, his future
wife, on 7 June 1918 when returning to Omakarana, a village in the Trobriands, I went
round the village and it was real fun to see the old niggers again. You know how little
sentiment I put into my relations with the niggs and with regard to my whole life here.
But coming here . . . was so intensely reminiscent of my time here three years ago that
it gave and gives me a thrill. See Helena Wayne, ed., The Story of a Marriage: The Letters
of Bronislaw Malinowski and Elsie Masson, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1995), 1:151.
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14. Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man (1961; reprint, New York:
Mentor, 1963), pp. 140, 146.
15. George W. Stocking Jr., The Ethnographers Magic and Other Essays in the History of
Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), p. 15.
16. Anthony Forge, The Lonely Anthropologist, New Society, 18 August 1967, pp.
221223, quote on p. 221.
17. Ian Hogbin, Review of Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, American Anthropologist
70:3 (1968): 575.
18. I. M. Lewis, Review of Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, Man 3:2 (1968): 348
349.
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***
Out of the gun smoke of the reviews, there emerged three longerlasting positions on the Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term. Stocking
sought to explain it in terms of its psychological context: not so
much a chronicle of ethnographic work, he suggested, as an account of the central psychological drama of his life . . . a tale of oedipal conflict, of simultaneous erotic involvement with two women
. . . and of unresolved national identity, symbolized by his mother
back in Poland.25 The Diary did indeed affront the association we
have become accustomed to make between anthropology and tolerance, but it was best seen as part of Malinowskis need to create a kind of internal enclave of European culture, and must also
be interpreted in the light of his formal anthropological writings,
which clearly demonstrate an interaction [with Trobriander people] which, however emotionally complex, involved, with varying
degrees, tolerance, sympathy, empathy and even identification.26
Geertz had used the original publication of the Diary in 1967 as
an opportunityseized on by poststructuralist intellectuals in other
fields besides, not least in literary criticismOedipally to unseat one
of his disciplines progenitorsin effect, to deny the existence of
giants, while standing on their shoulders. But as time passed, he
broadened his assault by switching his attention to the dimly humanist and scientifically under-scrutinized notion of rapport,
sympathy, and empathy between fieldworker and subject, anthropologist and native, that Malinowski had often been taken to incarnate. The myth of the chameleon fieldworker, perfectly self-tuned
to his exotic surroundings, a walking miracle of empathy, tact, patience, and cosmopolitanism, Geertz wrote, was demolished [albeit unintentionally] by the man who had perhaps done most to
create it.27
Finally, James Clifford and Christina Thompson took more literarycritical or cultural approaches by analyzing what Malinowski wrote
in terms of what he read, and focusing on his relation to fellow25. Stocking, The Ethnographers Magic (above, n. 15), p. 251.
26. George W. Stocking Jr., Empathy and Antipathy in the Heart of Darkness, in Readings in the History of Anthropology, ed. Regna Darnell (New York: Harper & Row, 1974),
pp. 281287, quotes on pp. 281, 284, 286.
27. Clifford Geertz, From the Natives Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding, in Meaning in Anthropology, ed. Keith H. Basso and Henry A.
Selby (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), pp. 221237, quotes on
pp. 221222. For Geertz, therefore, the Diary ultimately revealed itself to be the backstage masterpiece of anthropology, our The Double Helix; see Geertz, Works and Lives:
The Anthropologist as Author (Oxford: Polity Press, 1988), p. 75.
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This inaccessibility is as much cultural and intellectual as it is physical and sexual. The Tatras mountains whisper the promise of happiness because they are knowable and knownto a Pole. Landscape
44. Ibid., p. 42.
45. Ibid., p. 49.
46. Ibid., p. 29.
47. Ibid., p. 24.
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feel life, as in the eyes of a living person . . .).54 The theme comes
to a climax on a voyage to Woodlark Island in February 1915, when
Malinowskiblaming the uncreative demon of escape from realitycame on deck with Kiplings Plain Tales from the Hills in hand:
What was going on around was marvelous! Sea perfectly smooth, two abysses
of blueness on either side. To the right the indentations of Sariba, islands, islets, covered with tall trees. To the left, the shadows of distant mountainsthe
shores of Milne Bay. Farther, the shores move away on either side; to the left
only the high wall of East Cape, covered with clouds, forming the threatening
point of the horizon; to the right pale shapes loom up out of the eternity of
blueness, slowly turning into volcanic rocks, sharp, pyramid-shaped, or else
into flat coral islands: phantom forests floating in melting blue space. One
after the other comes into being and passes away. The space darkensbrickcolored spots on the cloudsto the east, a flat sheet of coral covered with gigantic trees over yellow sand in the cold bluenessstrangely reminds me of
the islets in the Vistula.55
The nostalgic note reminds us of other dangers in these interludes. Like sirens, they drew Malinowski from human reality into
reverie. Loss of subjectivism and deprivation of the will . . ., he
wrote, combined with living only by the five senses and the body
(through impressions) causes direct merging with surroundings.56
So it was that what he called the joie de vivre tropicale was at once
oppressive and stimulatingbroadens horizons and paralyzes you
utterly.57 The strong zodiacal light of the tropics58 produced a
false intellectual dawn in which responding attentively to light and
distance was a substitute for responding attentively to ethnogr.
studies. Such sea visions were evasive in a second sense also: evocative as they were, they grew toward writing consciously composed
as art, rather than the natural disorder and emphasis on which
authentic diary writing depends. They were a writerly addiction,
just as reading Kiplings stories was a readerly one.
Only on land could Malinowski escape the zodiacal light of aestheticism, or convert it into tactile intellectual value. Here and
there you can see the green slopes of the surrounding hills, he told
himself at the end of October 1914, but otherwise the thickets
cover everything:
54. Ibid., p. 71.
55. Ibid., p. 91.
56. Ibid., p. 33.
57. Ibid., p. 80.
58. Ibid., p. 71.
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We crossed a muddy little river. A garden on one slope. I stopped to rest when
we came to a little burned patch. It was hot and very humid, I felt fairly well.
I began to climb up through the overgrown garden and impassable paths.
Slowly a vista opened up: a flood of green; a steep ravine overgrown with
jungle; a rather narrow view on the sea. I asked about the division of land. It
would have been useful to find out about the old [precolonial?] system of division and study todays as a form of adaptation. I was very tired, but my heart
was all right and I was not short of breath.59
Only a day or two before, he had played with what he called literary conceptions: in the beauty of a landscape I rediscover womans
beauty or I look for it.61 But this passage forgoes that kind of aesthetic self-indulgence and yokes a genuine realism to a diary-style
presentation. His plans are accompanied by an olfactory, visual, and
ultimately auditory sequence that is realistic rather than zodiacal.
The subtle and the exquisite are penetrated by the lewd: blossoms
carved in alabaster are smiling with golden pollen in a bucolic
idyll; dirty socks and menstruation give way to wine in ferment; and
everything is intellectually in ferment also, so that the ethnographer can imagine a burgeoning and fertile synthesis of sea-values
(joyous and bright; visual) with jungle-values (sultry and drench59. Ibid., p. 32.
60. Ibid., p. 85.
61. Ibid., p. 83.
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ing; musical) that would be lasting and real: filled with the bliss of
direct contact and a genuineness of the mood.62
The last entry in the first diary was written amid the Whitsunday
Islands, halfway between Cairns and Brisbane on the Queensland
coast. It recuperates New Guinean themes, and it poetically infuses
the vision from on board the ship with an intellectual vision of
progress and (limited) achievement, requiring further immersion in
reality:
Should like to make a synthesis of this voyage. Actually the marvelous sights
filled me with noncreative delight. As I gazed, everything echoed inside me, as
when listening to music. Moreover I was full of plans for the future.The sea
is blue, absorbing everything, fused with the sky. At moments, the pink silhouettes of the mountains appear through the mist, like phantoms of reality
in the flood of blue, like the unfinished ideas of some youthful creative force.
You can just make out the shapes of the islands scattered here and thereas
though headed for some unknown destination, mysterious in their isolation,
beautiful with the beauty of perfectionself-sufficient.63
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chapter of which (London) concerns the inability of an expatriate to resettle in what had once been his home. And many of the
novels that Malinowski read have an almost manifestly ethnographic quality, from Fenimore Coopers Great Lakes to Thackerays London, and Hardys Wessex to Dostoevskys Novgorod. From
his correspondence with his future wife, we know that Malinowski
noted a rather weak story of KiplingRegulus: A Stalky Tale
which, all the same, is right in showing the necessity of a humanistic education. (Balance, proportion, perspectivelife, Kiplings
Latin master lectures a chemistry teacher: Your scientific man is the
unrelated animalthe beast without background. Havent you ever
realized that in your atmosphere of stinks?)80 Kim appears to have
made a stronger impression: a very interesting novel, gives a great
deal of information about India (p. 41)as well it might, given
that a central character in the novel is both an ethnologist and a
spy. No beast is without a background in Kim, and the texture of the
book exists at a border between fiction and a form of Anglo-Indian
ethnography:
They were sons of subordinate officials in the Railway, Telegraph, and Canal
Services; of warrant-officers, sometimes retired and sometimes acting as commanders-in-chief to a feudatory Rajahs army; of captains in the Indian Marine, Government pensioners, planters, Presidency shopkeepers, and missionaries. A few were cadets of the old Eurasian houses that have taken strong root
in DhurrumtollahPereiras, De Souzas, and DSilvas. Their parents could well
have educated them in England, but they loved the school that had served
their own youth, and generation followed sallow-hued generation at St Xaviers. Their homes ranged from Howrah of the railway people to abandoned
cantonments like Monghyr and Chunar; lost tea-gardens Shillong-way; villages where their fathers were large landholders in Oudh or the Deccan;
Mission-stations a week from the nearest railway line; seaports a thousand
miles south, facing the brazen Indian surf; and cinchona-plantations south of
all. The mere story of their adventures, which to them were no adventures, on
their road to and from school would have crisped a Western boys hair.81
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Youve been eaten up by your idiotic love of the land, that miserable bit of
land which has got you by the short hair, which prevents you from seeing any
further than your noses, which youd commit murder for! Youve been wedded to the land for centuries and shes made you into cuckolds. Look at America, the farmer is master of his land there. Theres nothing to attach him to it,
no family link, no memories. As soon as his field is exhausted, he moves on.
If he hears that five hundred miles away theyve discovered more fertile plains,
he ups and settles there. Hes free and hes making a lot of money, whereas
youre just poverty-stricken prisoners.
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