Off the Verandah

Bronislaw Malinowski
1884 - 1942

Bronislaw Malinowski was the anthropologist who really changed the way field studies were carried out. He worked on a remote group of Pacific islands and lived for long periods among the people he was studying and made their lives intelligible to the West.

• Bronislaw Malinowski (1884 - 1942) -- (MSU)

• Functionalism
  • History of Cultural Anthropology: The Development of Ethnological Theory
    
    
• Kula
  
  
• Major Publications
  
  
  • The Trobriand Islands (1915)
    • matrilineal
      
      
  • Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926)
    
    
  • Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926)
    
    
  • Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)
    
    
  • Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927)
    
    
  • The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929)
    
    
  • Coral Gardens and their Magic (1935)
    
    
  • A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944)
    
    
    • "Malinowski argued that culture functioned to meet the needs of individuals rather than society as a whole. He reasoned that when the needs of individuals, who comprise society, are met, then the needs of society are met." -- Wikipedia
      
      
    • Three types of needs society satisfies for individuals:
      
      
      1. individual biological needs
         • food / nutrition / water
         • reproduction
         • shelter / safety
           
           
      2. instrumental needs (institutions that meet biological needs)
         • education
         • political organization / social control / law
         • economics
           
           
      3. integrative needs (systems that encode values)
         • magic
         • religion
         • science
         • art
           
           
  • Freedom & Civilization (1944)
    
    
  • The Dynamics of Culture Change (1945)
    
    
  • Magic, Science, and Religion (1948)
    
    
  • A Diary In the Strict Sense of the Term (1967)

Also featured in the video . . .

• Sir Edmund Leach
• Sir Raymond Firth
• Lucy Mair