Argonauts of the Western Pacific An Account of Native...

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski, (1884–1942) was a British anthropologist of Polish descent. Born in Kraków, Poland, he studied at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków, and in Leipzig. He moved to London in 1910. In 1914 Malinowski took part in an expedition to New Guinea and Melanesia and spent the next four years studying the people of the Trobriand Islands of the Southwest Pacific. He began teaching at the University of London in 1924 and became professor of social anthropology in 1927. Between 1939 and 1942 he was a visiting professor at Yale University. He was the founder of functionalism, a school in anthropology which maintains that cultures should be studied in terms of their particular internal dynamics.

This book, a classic in anthropology, describes in great detail the Kula system of the Trobriand Islands in New Guinea. In the Kula, valuables are circulated among the various islands in a complicated, ceremonial way. This system is a kind of “gift” culture, in which status is not obtained from the possession of material objects, but by handling them or giving them away, similar to the potlatch of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast of Canada and the United States. This also has some relevance to the modern “Open Source” movement.

The book itself had a huge impact on anthropology, because of Malinowski’s at that time novel approach of anthropological research, in which the author immerged himself in the culture he studied, using informal interviews, direct observation, participation in the life of the group, and collective discussions.