Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Malinowski, Bronislaw Kasper

 

Born Apr. 7, 1884, in Krakow; died May 16, 1942, in New Haven, Conn., USA. Polish-born British anthropologist and sociologist. Graduated from the University of Kraków in 1908. Lived and worked in Great Britain from 1927 and, in his last years, in the USA.

Malinowski did his main ethnological field work in New Guinea and Melanesia between 1914 and 1918. He was the founder of the “functional” school of anthropology, which significantly influenced many contemporary bourgeois anthropologists and sociologists. Viewing ethnology from a utilitarian standpoint, he believed that it should promote successful colonial administration under new historical conditions through “indirect” government.

WORKS

The Natives of Mailu. Adelaide, 1915.
Argonauts of the Western Pacific. New York, 1961.
Sex, Culture and Myth. [London, 1967].
A Scientific Theory of Culture and Other Essays. New York, 1960.
Dynamics of Culture Change. London, 1946.

REFERENCES

Ol’derogge, D. A., and I. I. Potekhin. “Funktsional’naia shkola v ethnografii na sluzhbe britanskogo imperializma.” Tr. In-ta ethnografii AN SSSR, new series, vol. 12. Moscow, 1951.

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.