Bronislaw Malinowski
1884 - 1942
---was born in Krakow, Poland on April 7, 1884 and became influential in British
anthropology and is the founder of Functionalism. His first field study came in
1915-18 (Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea in the southwest Pacific). He used a
holistic approach in studying the native’s social interactions including the
annual Kula Ring Exchange, (to be associated with magic, religion, kinship and
trade). He died in 1942.
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)
KEY WORDS:
The ethnographic process, Dene, Trobrianders
Emic Approach: local-oriented approach to
anthropological investigations.
Etic Approach: Scientific-oriented approach
to anthropological investigations.
Paradigm: a pattern or model of thought.
Key words (cont)
Ethnographic Realism: presenting an
accurate, objective, scientific account of a
different way of life, written by someone
who knew it first hand.
Ethnographic Present: the period before
Westernization, when “true” Native culture
flourished. (Eternal qualities of
timelessness given to Native cultures).
Positionality: situated knowledge
produced by positioned actors
This lesson has three
objectives:
1st to start to understand the dilemma of
every anthropologist in the field:
2nd to position the ethnographer not only
as someone recording the life of a society
or culture but also as someone who both
affects that life and is affected by it
And 3rd to be aware of how the
relationship between ethnographic
fieldwork and the ethnographer affects
not only the process of fieldwork but its
Why?
Why do we need to know about these
ethnographic dynamics and its
effects?
1. so that we as students of
anthropology start the process of
understanding that context (who we
are as ethnographers and who they are
as subjects of our studies) is not
detached from content (what we say
Malinowski developed three
standard themes in all his
ethnographies
First: aspects of cultures cannot be
studied in isolation; they must be
understood in the context of heir use (he
was not talking about historical context
but social context and cultural context
that he saw separate from historical
context (colonialism, etc).
Second of Malinowski
Ethnographic Themes
Second: he established the principle that
one cannot over rely on the informal
descriptions of people because people may
say one thing and do another.
The third of Malinowski’s
Ethnographic Themes
Third: when one put the “primitive’
action into its proper context (cultural
particularism) one would understand
that his action is reasonable.
The key elements of the method
of participant observation
developed by Malinowski and
utilized by anthropologists even
today usually involves the
following:
a.
Living in the context for
an extended period of time
b.
Learning and using local
languages and dialect
c.
Actively participating in a
wide range of
daily; routine and extraordinary
activities with people in that
context.
d. Using everyday
conversations as
interview techniques
---Informally
observing during
leisure activities
(hanging out)
e. Recording
observations in the
field notes (usually
organized
chronologically) and;
f. Using both tacit and
Marie Francoise Guedon
Studied Dene of Alaska (60’s 70’s) and
other Indigenous communities in North
America
Dene Ways and the Ethnographer’s
Culture (1998)
In the book: Being Changed by CrossCultural Encounters (Young and
Goulet1998)
Discussion Question
How and why does the process of learning and
understanding a culture’s language, concepts,
practices, categories, rules etc. change both
ethnography as a method and the ethnographer as
a person?