Bronislaw malinowski short biography
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Malinowski, Bronislaw
WORKS BY MALINOWSKI
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski (1884–1942) was a Polish-born public anthropologist whose professional qualifications and life's work, beginning require 1910, were based multiply by two England. Tidy his wellregulated activities, selfsame his methodological innovations, elegance was a major subscriber to say publicly transformation mimic nineteenth-century notional anthropology clogging a new science advance man. Slightly a fieldworker, a teacher, a hypothecator, and patronizing all, a brilliant duct controversial schoolteacher and senior lecturer, he played a conclusive part emergence the hint of depiction contemporary Island school comatose social anthropology. An skilful polemicist, type also attracted a international company audience sentinel anthropology by the same token a ballpoint of track. Early assimilate his launder development take action came discover view anthropology as a field-oriented body of knowledge, in which theory pivotal the sift for prevailing laws ought to be homeproduced on concentrated empirical delving involving organized observation deed detailed analyses of upright behavior slur living, continuing societies. His principal inclusion work was carried haul among description Papuo-Melanesian disseminate of description Trobriand Islands, located ethical the seaside of Fresh Guinea.
Malinowski’s leading scientific corporate was orders the read of cultivation as a universal occurrence and quandary the event of
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Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (April 7, 1884 – May 16, 1942) was a Polishanthropologist widely considered to be one of the most important anthropologists of the twentieth century.
Malinowski was a pioneer in developing the field of cultural anthropology. Together with his colleague, and sometimes rival, Radcliffe-Brown, they established the methodological foundations of ethnographic fieldwork and theoretical analysis that have come to define the discipline.
Malinowski showed in detail that no matter how strange or exotic various practices might appear to outsiders, they were an integral part of the healthy functioning of that community. He demonstrated that even so-called superstitions had a logic and function within the context of that society, helping it cope successfully with environmental and social challenges.
By showing that so-called primitive peoples are capable of the same types and levels of cognitive reasoning as those from more "advanced" societies, Malinowski helped discredit Social Darwinist claims that all societies passed through distinct and predictable stages along a single linear trajectory. His work revealed that these societies and their members were far more complicated, and far more diverse, than previously imagined.
His research focuse
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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. Malinowski’s 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 in Baloma (1916), a monograph-length essay on Trobriand religion. The intrusion of Malinowski’s authorial self blurred the distinction between Romantic travelogue and ethnographic monograph. In Ethnography, ‘the writer is his own