BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI - THEORIST

Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski was a great field worker, despite the mental and physical suffering he faced as an anthropologist. His diaries, which were published years after his death, show a sensitive and impulsive tone. Above all, the papers are very interesting for field workers and psychiatrists (Robert 1993).



Malinowski was born and raised in Krakow, Poland. His family was aristocratic and educated, his father was a teacher and recognized as Slavic philologist. From an early age, it appeared that Bronislaw was an academic. Cracow University awarded him a scholarship to do a doctorate in mathematics and physics in 1908. During his college years he developed a great interest in popular psychology, working closely with the studies of the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt.

His poor health prevented him to succeed as a mathematician, but he had the opposite effect as he recovered, and during this he read The Golden Bough, which was his first attempt to read an English masterpiece in its original language. Whatever our opinion on the consideration of this book as a masterpiece, we can thank that inspired him and made him change his mind about his future. England was the European center of anthropology, so in 1910, Malinowski graduated from the London School of Economics, where he earned a doctorate in 1916. He presented theses titled The Family among the Australian Aborigines (1913) and The Native of Mailu (1915).

He first worked with Charles Gabriel Seligman and Edward Westermarck, the great Finnish social scientist who wrote The History of Human Marriage. Seligman especially prepared for him, and encouraged and lent him money and helped him in his work and field work, but then separated because they had different ideas about competition and aims of anthropology. Malinowski's first work was published in English was an article (1912) on economic anthropology, in a volume commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of Westermarck, Malinowski's work was also influenced by WHR Rivers, who critically analyzed. Malinowski believed that Emile Durkheim and Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz, along with Westermarck, were the founders of empirical sociology, which was as it was called social anthropology.

In 1914, with the help of Seligman, Malinowski did fieldwork in New Guinea. He spent several months with the Mailu, but returned to Australia in February 1915 due to financial difficulties, which resolved with the help of Seligman. He returned to New Guinea in May and made ...