Bronislaw MalinowskiBorn 7 Apr 1884; died 16 May 1942 at age 58. Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski was a Polish-British anthropologist, one of the most important in the 20th century, who is widely recognized as the founder of social anthropology. He is principally associated with field studies of the peoples of Oceania. In 1914, on a research assignment to Australia, the outbreak of WW I kept him partially confined to the Trobriand Islands, off the eastern tip of New Guinea. In 1920, he returned to teaching in London, and in 1938 moved to teach in the U.S. He was the pioneer of “participant observation”as a method of fieldwork, used in his works on the Trobriand Islanders, especially Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Coral Gardens and their Magic (2 vols, 1935), which set new standards for ethnographic description. |
