Reading Mix: Ethnographies: Argonauts of The Western Pacific by Bronislaw Malinowski

Previously: The Golden Bough by James Frazier

I have a secret guilty fondness for Malinowski. Perhaps ‘guilty’ isn’t quite the right word, and it shouldn’t really be a ’secret’ since Malinowski’s influence and the integrity of his scholarship are unquestionable. But.

As I mentioned, Sir James Frazer marks the transition from a broad conception of anthropology, produced by well-educated amateurs and museum curators, to a more fragmented form of discipline, produced by academics who specialized in its branches: most social anthropologists studied the biological dimensions of humankind and their evolution. Prehistory and archeology became separate disciplines, ones of marginal interest to most modern anthropologists. The leading proponent, and most skilled promoter, of a self-defined modern form of social anthropology, one marked off from historically related intellectual developments, was Bronislaw Malinowski. Since evolutionism at that time was falling out of popular favor (and with its decline went much of the market for anthropology), Malinowski was much concerned with ways of making his new brand of the discipline known to the general public and of winning respect for it within intellectual circles. Read more.

On returning, jobless, from fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski tried to establish his reputation by writing a readable book acceptable to a commercial publisher. Shortly after “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” (which I think is his best book) was published and he had gained the financial security of a permanent lectureship at the London School of Economics, Malinowski diversified his attempts to spread his name beyond the confines of his chosen discipline. He achieved this through “Argonauts of the Western Pacific,” where he sought to use the evidence of his Trobriand material to revise Freud and to question the supposed universality of the Oedipus complex. Though orthodox Freudians summarily rebuffed his challenge to their position, his controversial endeavor gave him an immediate entree to the intellectual left-wing circles of London social life, where he soon made his mark. His views became slogans of progressive morality and education, and through his promotion of anthropology (functionalist anthropology, that is, with which he countered Elliot Smith’s diffusionism, then the prevalent methodology) as a valid means of finding solutions to problems of sex and marriage, and of social change, especially in Africa, he was able to effect a new and popular appreciation of the discipline. Colonial administrators began to regard the intensive study of peoples under their tutelage as much more potentially pertinent to their needs than anthropometry or diffusionist theories. Indeed, the idea of fieldwork was such a winning innovation that foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation stopped funding the research of diffusionists because they did not live with the peoples they studied.

Still, Malinowski never achieved anything like the degree of popularity enjoyed by Frazer or, later, Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. Though he was prepared to speak out on the radio or in brief articles, in none of his major works did he directly address the moral issues of his day or offer an alternative ethics for a renovated society. Some of his ethnographies, however, did gain a certain renown–should I say notoriety–among the literate public. While Malinowski did win something of a reputation among certain circles as a moral crusader, the primary basis of his popularity seems to have been educated laypersons’ interest in authoritative, authentic accounts of the exotic, especially with respect to the varieties of sexual experience.

He had a distinct penchant for flamboyant titles: “Crime and Custom in Savage Society,” “Sex and Repression in Savage Society,” and, most infamously, “The Sexual Life of Savages.” On a visit to the US, he found the English edition of this last book sold alongside “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” by D.H. Lawrence and Frank Harris’s “My Life and Loves.” XD

Despite its title, “The Sexual Life of Savages” is in fact an intelligent account of Trobriand domestic life. Nevertheless, it generated much controversy. Reviewers were skeptical of the Trobrianders’ ignorance of the biology of procreation and the local girls’ apparent ability to fornicate freely without getting pregnant. The prurient were fascinated by the detailed and explicit accounts of Trobriand sexual behavior. Malinowksi tried to repair the damage as best as he could by writing in a Special Foreword to the third edition that he wanted the book to be regarded as an achievement in fieldwork and in methods of exposition. However, it appeared people were less interested in accounts of functionalism than of sex. The book continued to sell. In fact, I believe it’s still in print today.

The thing about Malinowski is that his attempts to popularize anthropology via his books often tended to go the way of decidedly unscientific aggrandizement (Evans-Pritchard, hegemon of British anthropology from the 1940’s on, sniffed at Malinowski as a “bloody gas-bag”). However, Malinowski was also a consciously literary writer. Frazer, who was his teacher, was one of his two main models; the other was Joseph Conrad. He used the same elegiac tone as Frazer and similarly framed his work as an odyssey into another world with himself as the readers’ expert guide: “Let us imagine that we are sailing along the South coast of New Guinea towards its Eastern end…” Heeding the example of his mentor, Malinowski detailed the landscape and ambience of his exotic island ‘home’ in compelling, vivid terms. His prose in “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” seldom strays into the highly abstract, is thick with adjectives of color, tone, feeling, size. He employs what one might call a ’syntax of agency’; his preferred tense is the present, and his favored voice the active. Things have not ‘been done,’ Trobrianders (and Malinowski) ‘do’ them. As an exotic yarn-spinner, with a rare tale to tell, Malinowski at times blurs the line between mytho-poetic fiction and what is drawn from actual experience. He also classes his characters archetypically: the indigenes, with their mysterious but explicable ways; the narrow-minded colonial residents, who always get the locals wrong; the Ethnographer-as-Hero, who sets our understanding straight. And, just in case readers failed to observe the correspondence between his style and Frazer’s, Malinowski gave his cleverly crafted work a similarly classical title. He wanted “Argonauts of the Western Pacific” to be seen, in part, as a “Golden Bough” of his times. The ‘golden fleece,’ as it were.

Many of Malinowski’s academic successors did not approve of his style (nor, I suppose, that of his student Firth’s belletristic “We, The Tikopia” which I also enjoyed, also a tad guilitily). Wishing to regard anthropology as a science which investigated normative social systems, they disliked the romantic streak within his works. Evans-Pritchard branded “Argonauts” as ‘journalistic’ (but more on Evans-Pritchard and his writing later). There’s also the fact that the internal unity of Malinowski’s books seems to rely less on logical organization than on his skill as a writer. Malinowski was not a systematist, rather a representative of a romantic mode of thought who was impatient with neat verbal definitions. He’s frequently wordy, often flippant, occasionally trivial, and sometimes even, well, cheap. This is the foreword to the third edition of “The Sexual Life of Savages”–

Let me confess at once: the magnificent title of the Functional School of Anthropology has been bestowed by myself, in a way on myself, and to a large extent out of my own sense of irresponsibility… The only thing which I can claim in extenuation of this act of self-appointment was that it was not done without some sense of humor.

Oh, I am the cook and the captain bold,
And the mate of the Nancy brig:
And the bo’sun tight
And the midship mite
And the crew of the captain’s jig…

PS: Trobrianders might have remembered Malinowski as “The Man of Songs” but I don’t think they meant it so literally. I don’t know of any self-respecting anthropologist now who would quote a ditty from Gilbert & Sullivan in the preface to a major ethnography