Malinowski, Bronislaw Kasper (1884–1942)

Polish-born British anthropologist. Malinowski was one of the principal founders of the theory of functionalism in the social sciences. During expeditions to the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, in 1914–16 and 1917–18 his detailed studies of the islanders led him to see customs and practices in terms of their function in creating and maintaining social order.

His fieldwork involved a revolutionary system of ‘participant observation’ whereby the researcher became completely involved in the life of the people he studied. He was reader in social anthropology 1924–27 and professor from 1927 at the University of London, and was visiting professor at Yale, USA, from 1938.

He wrote several influential monographs on the islanders, including Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1928), The Sexual Life of Savages (1929), and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935).

Malinowski was born in Kraków, Poland, and educated there at Jagiellonian University, and at Leipzig, Germany. He went to the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1910. In 1914 he was attending meetings of the British Association in Melbourne, Australia, when war was declared against Germany. Technically an enemy alien, he was allowed to conduct research in the Trobriand Islands. His work at the LSE gave him a reputation as one of the world's leading social anthropologists. Most British anthropologists of the 1930s and 1940s were trained by him.