His diaries, published posthumously in 1967, showed him to be a racist and narcissist whose “fellow-feeling for the people he lived with was limited in the extreme”, as one critic put it. How else, he asked, could one study the “imponderabilia” of everyday life? Pioneer though he was, Malinowski shared the prejudices of his era. Malinowski argued that researchers must embed themselves in the world of the people they study “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world”. His methodology, which came to be known as “participant observation”, shaped modern anthropology. He spent two years there, living among the people and carefully documenting their lives. In June 1915, he pitched up in the Trobriand Islands, off the east coast of New Guinea. Malinowski (pictured left) did the opposite. They stayed away from the field to preserve their “objectivity”. Taylor & Francis £19.99īefore Bronislaw Malinowski, who worked mainly in the early 20th century, anthropologists mostly worked from “the veranda” or the “armchair”, using second-hand sources to study cultures in lands that their countries had colonised. A resurgence is overdue.Īrgonauts of the Western Pacific. Businesses and governments are calling more often on anthropologists to help them understand the complexities of the societies in which they operate. In a time of polarisation and group-think anthropology’s insights, gained from close study of how people actually live, can be a corrective. Yet, as the anthropologist Eric Wolf declared in 1964, ”anthropology is both the most scientific of the humanities and the most humanistic of the sciences.” As these books show, it still has much to tell us. As a result, the discipline’s cultural relevance has diminished in recent years, along with money for universities’ anthropology departments.
Anthropologists spend years gathering their findings and their results are not replicable.
Its central method of conducting fieldwork in communities is unlike those of other academic disciplines, including sociology, which draws on large data sets. The Greek roots of the word anthropology mean “human being” and “study”. I F YOU ASK 100 anthropologists what they do you could easily get 101 different answers.
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