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of the Histories of Anthropology

Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology, is the author of the famous Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), a landmark work that made participant observation a methodological imperative and reinvented ethnography as a literary genre. Of Polish origin, he contributed to shaping a new anthropological sensitivity through his Socratic seminars at the London School of Economics. A multifaceted personality, participating in many debates, he worked for a second revolution when he promoted the priority study of change in the colonial context. Vilified by postcolonial criticism, he remains a legendary figure.

Keywords: Social and cultural anthropology | Applied anthropology | Functionalism | Ethnography | British colonialism | United Kingdom | Poland | Melanesian studies | Trobriand | Magico-religious practices | Family and kinship | Concept of culture | Cultural contact/“Culture contact” | Sexuality

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