Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski                                                                    

(7-Apr-1884) –(16-May-1942)

Poland born British Anthropologist

Strength: pioneer fieldworker, spoke local language and communicated with the locals.

Weakness: Was sick in his childhood. Wouldn’t have interacted with the locals unless the WWI occurred.

Rival: A.R. Radcliffe-Brown

Malinowski was a British anthropologist who is well known to have broken the trend of anthropologists being an “armchair anthropologists” and conducted fieldworks.  He studied the Pacific Islanders, and is famous for his study of the people of the Trobriand Island where he got stranded because of the break out of the World War and thus was able to study extensively. He argued that participation observation was important and he himself learned the local language and interacted with the locals. He is also credited to have started the functionalist branch of Anthropology- a branch that believes that every aspect of a culture has an underlying function.

Selected bibliography:

The Trobriand Islands (1915)

 Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)

The Scientific Theory of Culture (1922)

Magic, Science, and Religion (1948)

The Dynamics of Culture Change (1961)