Obrębski, Józef (1905–1967)

Polish social anthropologist Józef Obrębski (1905–1967) was a disciple of Malinowski and the first anthropologist who applied Malinowski’s method and theory to a European village. He conducted his fieldwork in the 1930s in Macedonia and the Belarusian-Ukrainian borderland and in the 1940s in Jamaica. From 1948 he lived in the US and was an expert at the UN Trusteeship Department and afterwards a professor of anthropology and sociology at New York universities. Although extremely innovative in his time, his works remained mostly unpublished due to the events of World War II and his emigration from Poland. Obrębski remains unknown in the anthropological mainstream, but can be seen as a precursor of ethnic, gender and postcolonial studies.

Keywords: Anthropology of Europe | Social anthropology | Anthropology of peasantry | Ethnosociology | Functionalism | 20^th century | Poland | Belarus | Macedonia | Eastern Europe | Caribbean | Caribbean anthropology | European Studies | Jamaica | Peasants | Nation | Nation building | Bronislaw Malinowski