Bronisław Malinowski

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski (Krakow, Austro-Hungarian Empire; April 7, 1884-New Haven, Connecticut; May 16, 1942) was the founder of British social anthropology after its renewal methodological based on personal experience of field work and the functional consideration of culture.

Biography

He was born into a wealthy Polish middle-class family. He is the son of Lucjan Malinowski, a Slavist specialized in the Silesian Polish dialect. During his childhood he suffered from the ailments of fragile health. In 1897 his mother traveled with him through southern European countries for health reasons. In 1903 he began to study philosophy at the University of Krakow, earning a doctorate in 1908, specializing in physics and mathematics. He moved to Leipzig (Germany) to deepen his knowledge in psychology and economics under the direction of C. G. Seligman. Reading The Golden Bough by James Frazer turned his interest towards Social Anthropology, which took him to England to train in this discipline, obtaining his degree. at the London School of Economics in 1910. He was a professor at this University from 1913, and received his doctorate there in 1916.

In 1914 he traveled to Papua (present-day Papua New Guinea), where he carried out field work in Mailu and the Trobriand Islands. As a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in territory under British jurisdiction, the declaration of the First World War forced him to accept exile in the Trobriand Islands until the war ended. This is where he carried out his field work on the kula and began to advocate the so-called "participant observer" methodology. However, years after his death, his widow Valetta Swann would publish his diaries in 1967 Field Diary in Melanesia . Which generated great controversy around his research, since his writing, more than ethnographic work, seemed like poetic narratives. In his diaries Malinowski left writings that shared intimate facts and thoughts from his travels that were free of any morality.

In 1922 he obtained a doctorate in anthropology at the London School of Economics, and his masterpiece Argonauts of the Western Pacific was published, which It gave him universal fame. In Great Britain he also worked at the University of London, and in the United States at the universities of Cornell, Harvard and Yale. In November 1929 he arrived in Havana where he met the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz, with whom he exchanged ideas and information about social phenomena that are changes in culture and the impacts of civilizations. In July 1940 he was working at Yale University, where he wrote the introduction to Dr. Ortiz's book Cuban Counterpoint of Tobacco and Sugar.

He died in 1942 of a heart attack while preparing to direct field work in Oaxaca (Mexico), barely turning 58 years old.

Malinowski and psychoanalysis

In The sexual life of the savages of northwestern Melanesia and other works, Malinowski criticized with empirical data the universality of the Oedipus complex, postulated by Freud as a central concept of his psychoanalytic theory. In Malinowski (1924) he proposed the concept of "main complex" (al.: Kernkomplex) as a generalization of the Freudian concept. Malinowski's criticism is based on the fact that the Oedipus complex supposes the patrilineal monogamous family and that this concept of family cannot be generalized to other societies:

If family life is of decisive importance to anaymic life, then its precise character is to be observed with greater attention. For "the family" is not the same in all human societies. Its nature changes greatly with the degree of development and the type of civilization of a people, and it is not identical in the different stages of development of the same society.

Malinowski's proposal is that the main complex can take different forms in different societies, so that, in the European society that Freud lived, that complex takes the form of the Oedipus complex. In this context it is important to emphasize that Malinowski wanted to generalize and expand Freudian theory so that it can be applied to other societies and not reject it:

Psychoanalysis created the correct basis for the psychology of the primitive [people], for it emphasized that the interest of the primitives is concentrated in themselves, as well as in the people of their environment, and that he is of a libidin nature, which so far was involved in false conceptions about the non-affective interest of men by nature and by philosophical speculations about the Ser-Destiny.