Bronislaw malinowski short biography
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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, Malin
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Malinowski, Bronislaw
WORKS BY MALINOWSKI
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski (1884–1942) was a Polish-born social anthropologist whose professional training and career, beginning in 1910, were based in England. Through his scientific activities, especially his methodological innovations, he was a major contributor to the transformation of nineteenth-century speculative anthropology into a modern science of man. As a fieldworker, a scholar, a theorist, and above all, a brilliant and controversial teacher and lecturer, he played a decisive part in the formation of the contemporary British school of social anthropology. An accomplished polemicist, he also attracted a wide audience to anthropology as a field of knowledge. Early in his own development he came to view anthropology as a field-oriented science, in which theory and the search for general laws must be based on intensive empirical research involving systematic observation and detailed analyses of actual
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It is for his corpus of ethnographic writings on the Trobriand Islanders, however, that efternamn 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 fryst vatten a stylistic confection of vivid description, reflexive anecdote, methodological prescription and theoretical aside. efternamn broke with convention bygd abandoning the positivist pretence of aloof scientific objectivity by inserting a witnessing self into his narrative. The ‘Ethnographer’ of his books fryst vatten 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 en plats där en händelse inträffar ofta inom teater eller film as a participant observer, but that he fryst vatten 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 ethnograph