The introduction of this edited volume could serve as an alternative title for it: “Revisiting the Life and Work of Bronisław Malinowski: On the Centenary of Argonauts of the Western Pacific.” Indeed, much more is at stake in this impressive collection of fourteen essays than exploring the anthropologist’s “legacy in the contemporary social sciences and humanities.” As the editors, Grażyna Kubica and Dariusz Brzeziński, point out, one of the volume’s aims is to present “the latest findings” (2) about Malinowski’s life: his homeland and his family, his formation between Kraków and Leipzig on the way to London, and the intricate interplay between the echoes of the nineteenth-century thought and the modernity surrounding WWI, of which he himself was a protagonist. The first three parts of the book are devoted, respectively, to this great tripartite aim. The second major aim is to reassess his work from twenty-first-century perspectives, especially anthropological ones, which identify in less-explored facets of Malinowski a kind of unacknowledged pioneering spirit, an avant-garde vision obscured under layers of scholastic focus on Argonauts of the Western Pacific.

In the resulting volume these two major aims prove deeply intertwined. Indeed, so many are the intersections between the contemporary reassessment of the work and the revisiting of Malinowski’s life, and so significant are the themes that resurface across the various parts of the volume and between chapters, that in this essay I have chosen to disregard its five-part structure, however solid, in order to highlight some of these encounters, these foreseen or unforeseen dialogues, among the various contributors.

More than half of them, it should be noted, are Polish scholars or readers of Polish, which is not an unimportant detail, since much of what is revealed about Malinowski’s life and work revolves not only around his troubled cosmopolitan identity, but also around a wealth of Polish-language sources. Chief among these is the complete edition of his diaries—which he began writing in 1908 in the autobiographical tradition of the journal intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel (1821–1881) and not in the Trobriand Islands—edited and introduced by Grażyna Kubica in the early twenty-first century (Malinowski 2002).

This is, in effect, a book of revelations that seeks both to add to those already made and to explore them in greater depth. The aim is to counter the inevitability that “revelations tend to be short-lived anomalies that pose no significant threat to the overarching body of knowledge shared by anthropologists” (219), as Marta Songin-Mokrzan writes in her chapter devoted to texts—such as Freedom and Civilization (1944) and The Dynamics of Culture Change (1945)—that challenge persistent ideas about, if not the stereotype of, Malinowski. There is perhaps an ironic dimension to the emphasis placed in the book’s title on the centenary of Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Among the various surprises this edited volume contains is the reappraisal, in positive terms and in dialogue with current trends, of A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944), one of Malinowski’s most disregarded works that has even at times been ridiculed as a simplistic and biologizing theory. This reassessment occurs in the chapter by Mateusz Stępień, who explores “the unfulfilled potential in Malinowski’s legal thought” (189), showing how it intersects with biology today, and suggesting that there are aspects of human nature that are sometimes favored and sometimes curtailed by law. A similar reappraisal takes place in the chapter by Andreas Lipowsky who, after criticizing the way an author is often “reduced to a single aspect of their work” (163), laments the lack of recognition by embodiment theorists that Malinowski’s work foreshadowed later body-centric anthropology. This, he claims, is not only because Malinowski set aside camera and notebook to join in with his informants’ activities, but also because of his commitment to a philosophical outlook that reacted against industrial modernity and its erasure of the spiritual and bodily dimensions of human life. “Science is the worst nuisance and the greatest calamity of our days. It has made us into robots,” Malinowski wrote in a 1930 text cited by Lipowsky (168).

The roots of this mindset in the nineteenth century, if not indeed a Romantic genealogy, do not invalidate its inscription within modernism as a cultural reaction to progress. Modernism is one of the three leitmotifs that run through the book, resurfacing both in chapters that respond to the second major goal mentioned above (such as Andrzej Kisielewski’s chapter on Malinowski’s anthropology as pioneering anthropology of art) and in those devoted to the first major goal, most notably Adam Kuper’s chapter on Malinowski as “a modernist in his way” (92). Kuper poses the following question: “Is there any connection between Malinowski’s new ethnographic paradigm and ‘modernism’ in philosophy and the arts and sciences?” (95). To answer it, he draws not only on the “new version of modernism” (96) of the Roaring Twenties—embodied and even symbolized by primitivisme in art—but also on earlier expressions from the Belle Époque, the period before WWI in which Malinowski, in his native Poland, was closely engaged with the leading figures of Polish modernism. Most notable among these was his close friend Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939), the writer, playwright, painter, photographer, art philosopher, and theorist, known to him as Staś and to posterity by his nickname, Witkacy. The complexity of the connections between different periods is suggested by the references, quotations, and coincidences running in both directions between anthropology on one side and literature and art on the other. An example of this is the well-known inspiration that the American-British modernist icon T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) drew from The Golden Bough (1890) by James George Frazer (1854–1941), but less well known is an article in which Eliot described Melanesians as “dying from pure boredom” (94). This suggests, by comparison, the “depressing effect” (Eliot 1922) that the disappearance of the music hall would also have because of cinema—a disappearance symbolized by the death of the actress Marie Lloyd, queen of the music hall, in 1922: yet another centenary.

In addition to Frazer, Malinowski owed a debt to multiple figures who, despite lingering into the twentieth century, belonged more to the nineteenth—either because of an obsessive attachment to origins and evolutionary conjectures, or because they did not question civilizational progress except through the “survivals” of primitivism that persisted within it.  Malinowski maintained an ambivalent relationship with these figures, torn between admiration and criticism. In his chapter devoted to Malinowski’s time at the University of Leipzig, Krzysztof Łukasiewicz explores recent literature—such as an important special issue of the Revue Germanique Internationale edited by Michel Espagne and Annika Haß (2022)—to highlight Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920) as a perfect example of this ambivalence. Despite his many reservations, Malinowski “most often cited Wundt” and “recommended that students read Wundt’s multi-volume Völkerpsychologie” (88). The case of the German economist Karl Bücher (1847–1930) also deserves attention, with Łukasiewicz subtly suggesting a connection between his work Arbeit und Rhythmus (Work and Rhythm, 1896) and Malinowski’s ethnography of the Trobrianders’ work in their coral gardens. In passing, we learn, or relearn, that Malinowski took musicology classes in Leipzig.

The second leitmotif I highlight in order to voluntarily reshuffle the table of contents is Malinowski’s complex Polishness. In his chapter “An Argonaut from Kraków: Pre-field Malinowski as a Theorist,” Petr Skalník (who in 1993 edited The Early Writings of Bronisław Malinowski with Robert J. Thornton) makes a convincing case: Malinowski’s rejection of pseudo-historical conjectures, whether evolutionist or diffusionist, went back not only to London before he left for Oceania, and to Leipzig, but also to Kraków. More than that, this Polish inheritance accompanied Malinowski throughout his international trajectory, not least through the occasional use of his mother tongue. A particularly telling example is his devastating Polish-language review of James George Frazer’s Totemism and Exogamy (1910). Written while already in London, its contents, Skalník writes, were “never revealed to Frazer” (66). From the diaries to published texts, from letters to conversations with compatriots in foreign lands, it is as if there were a hidden dimension in Bronisław Malinowski’s own life: the Polish dimension. I now bring on stage—theatrically, if I may—Kubica’s opening chapter: “Bronisław Malinowski—The (Somewhat Anglicized and Cosmopolitan) Pole: Biographical-Anthropological Reflections on His Polish Identity.”

Amid a myriad of essential details and names for the most part obscure outside Poland, it appears that the only painting in Malinowski’s house “as Gross remembered it, was Zofia Stryjeńska’s (1891–1976) Taniec zbójnicki [Robber Dance], one of a series of paintings she made in 1927 depicting folk motifs in the art deco style” (27). Kubica is referring here to Feliks Gross (1906–2006), one of many compatriots who elaborated on the theme of Malinowski’s Polish identity. The following words of Theodore Abel (1896–1988)—a Pole from Łódź of German origin who was a professor of sociology at Columbia University and who met Malinowski in New York—are as telling as Stryjeńska’s painting: “He [Malinowski] after all is quite sentimental about his origin in spite of his cynicism” (31). Referring specifically to the New Zealander disciple Raymond Firth (1901–2002), Kubica suggests that not just anyone could “read” (27) Malinowski’s Polishness, which was marked by a critical distance from anti-cosmopolitan nationalism that implied withdrawal, but not dispassion.

Malinowski dismissed the invitation (or challenge) to teach in Warsaw, though he had by then already achieved international fame. This dilemma finds echoes in Anna Engelking’s chapter, devoted to one of Malinowski’s most prominent Polish students at the LSE, Józef Obrębski (1905–1967). Although he eventually came to work in the US, Obrębski dismissed Malinowski’s proposal to continue their collaboration in London. To illuminate this decision, Engelking draws on a revealing passage from a later, nostalgic letter by Obrębski’s mother, Maria Obrębska, and summarizes: “loyal to the belief that ‘one can study abroad, but one should work in and for Poland,’ he didn’t accept Malinowski’s offer and returned to his home country” (152).^[1]I thank Anna Engelking for sharing the full original quotation with me: “I have never forgotten that letter in which Professor Malinowski wrote to me, asking whether, as a mother, I could allow you to continue working with him for a longer period. When I wrote to you about Malinowski’s letter, you replied that studying abroad was acceptable, but that one should work in Poland, and only for Poland.” (Letter from Maria Obrębska to Józef Obrębski, 27 April 1957, Obrębski Collection, University of Massachusetts Amherst Archives; my translation, revised by Adam Adach). Personal communication. If Malinowski embodied, for Obrębski, “the figure of a father, a friend and a sage” (154), Obrębski was not only a translator of the master’s works into Polish and the author of texts such as “O metodzie funkcjonalnej Bronisława Malinowskiego” (On Bronisław Malinowski’s Functionalist Method, 1939), he was like an alternate younger self, if not Malinowski’s Polish foil.

The third and final leitmotif I draw out of the volume revolves precisely around fatherhood and, more specifically, traverses the labyrinths of psychoanalysis. This is the explicit theme of Lena Magnone’s chapter on Malinowski’s dialogues with heretical disciples of Freud, in particular the Austrian Otto Rank (1884–1939), whose work Das Trauma der Geburt (The Trauma of Birth, 1923) undermined the Oedipus complex, and Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957), an Austrian-American of Jewish descent, for whom Malinowski’s work served to reinforce his thesis that a society with freer eroticism was possible. This went against the sexual inhibition of a patriarchy that Reich associated with fascism—the theme of his 1933 book Massenpsychologie des Faschismus. Along the way, we discover other figures, such as Otto Rank’s Polish wife, Beata Rank, née Minzer (1886–1961), who is “worth recalling on account of her initiatives regarding the transfer of psychoanalysis to Poland” (127). In a 1924 article, she presented an alternative thesis to that of Totem und Tabu (1913), if not a feminist one, arguing, as Magnone summarizes, “first, that matricide preceded patricide described by Freud, and second, that after the death of the primal father, women tried to regain power and were eventually defeated by a clan of brothers” (ibid.). Magnone traces Malinowski’s own transformations in his exploration of the relations between anthropology and psychoanalysis. They trace back to Poland and specifically to the year 1912, when he lived with Witkacy in Zakopane, a unique meeting place between the Polish intelligentsia and the rich folk culture of the Tatra highlanders. Witkacy was then undergoing analysis with Karol de Beaurain (1867–1927), one of the first Polish physicians to use psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method. “I need to stress Malinowski’s exceptionally early interest in psychoanalysis,” writes Magnone. “Early parts of Malinowski’s diary—which unfortunately are missing from the English-language edition—contain several descriptions of dreams and attempts at interpreting them,” as well as a reference to the neurologist and psychiatrist Stefan Borowiecki (1881–1937), a Polish disciple of Carl Gustav Jung, whom Malinowski “may have consulted in this period” (124).

The mythical Zakopane resurfaces in great force in the chapter “‘I Am Not Really a Real Character’: Malinowski, Witkiewicz and the Pitfalls of Making Oneself a ‘Character’,” in which the theater scholar Natalija Jakubova explores, not only in literary but also in psychological terms, the characters and situations inspired by Malinowski that Witkacy created in his works. In addition to the novel 622 upadki Bunga, czyli demoniczna kobieta (written in 1910–1911 and only published posthumously in 1972; partially translated into English twenty years later as “The 622 Downfalls of Bungo; or, The Demonic Woman”; see Witkiewicz 1992), the sarcastic 1919 essay “Demonizm Zakopanego” (Demonism of Zakopane) deserves attention. Malinowski appears as a double who embodies the illusion—the Zakopanian narcotic—of living one’s own life as a work of art, when at bottom this was nothing more than the persona, the “iconic figure” constructed by Malinowski himself, rather than the real, corporeal person whom Staś knew so intimately.

It is at my own risk that I also place the moving chapter “Our Ancestors,”—written by one of Malinowski’s grandchildren, Patrick Burke—under the “Freudian” theme. He explores not only the price his grandfather paid in his private life for his self-centered international success, but also the drama of his “increasingly neglected” (55) ailing wife, the Australian photographer, traveler, and writer Elsie Masson (1891–1935), and of their three daughters. This family drama extends to younger descendants, taking the form of a trauma, a burden, or, in the words of some, “Malinowski’s Curse,”^[2]The idea of Malinowski’s curse is explored in the 2015 documentary film, Savage Memory, which is available free on Tubi TV here. while others, notably Burke, take the story more lightly: “I do not feel burdened by having had Malinowski as a grandfather” (ibid.).

Fittingly, we can find echoes of the three motifs in the final article authored by the editor Dariusz Brzeziński, titled “Bronisław Malinowski and the Anthropology of Nostalgia.” Devoted to examining Malinowski’s own forms of nostalgia through the prism of the “robustly expanded” nostalgia studies, Brzeziński’s chapter identifies a significant “evolution over time” (240). A simultaneously Romantic and modern form of anticipatory exonostalgia, associated with the idea of salvaging vanishing worlds present in the ethnography of the Trobriand Islands, would give way to the recognition that the “comparison between the pathology of modern change and the healthy condition of tribalism” (Malinowski 1945) was in fact “based on the illusion of human memory, imbued with a longing for the past” (246). This conclusion, Brzeziński writes, is “fully in line with the contemporary research on the nature of nostalgia” (ibid.). In this respect, the chapter is in dialogue with the previously mentioned chapter by Marta Songin-Mokrzan on Malinowski’s studies of colonialism and imperial wars, and also with that of the Indigenous anthropologist linus s. digim’Rina, who, in ethnographic dialogue with Paramount Chief Pulayasi Daniel (GuyolaKiliwila—Chief of Kilivila), argues in “Gimwala and Kula: Malinowski’s Living Ethnography” that “A century later, the principles and rationale of Gimwala and Kula as described by Malinowski are palpably alive and well” (210). This is no longer the case in canoe expeditions, but it has been adapted in a variety of ways among United Church, Catholic, Seventh Day Adventist, and Pentecostal congregations that exist on the islands, or in the context of modern political institutions, such as general elections. But today’s nostalgia studies also make it possible to think about Malinowski’s endonostalgia, present in his journal intime and elsewhere, with strategies that allowed him not only to “escape” into the European world through its literature and art, but also to reconnect with the people and places of his native Poland, of Kraków, of Zakopane—a nostalgia not always acknowledged, but one which, as the present volume suggests, runs through every layer of Malinowski’s being.

I trust that this work will not be a short-lived anomaly, but rather that it will pose a significant threat to received ideas about Malinowski’s life and work, around and beyond the centenary of Argonauts of the Western Pacific. This may be because, as Aleksandar Bošković hints in his afterword, “Malinowski in Context,” all the contributors are personally involved with Malinowski’s work: “even as we speak about Malinowski, we actually speak about ourselves” (258). Interestingly, the theme of fatherhood resurfaces in the book’s final sentence, in connection with the idea that we are all Malinowski’s children: “Perhaps we all are” (259). Each reader will answer for themselves, not least because, as Grażyna Kubica and Dariusz Brzeziński write, we are today living through new imperial wars in Europe and around the world, which make especially relevant the values of “tolerance and generosity, based on the understanding of other men’s point of view” that Malinowski expressed in the famous concluding paragraphs of Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1984 [1922]). “Certainly, not only has this belief lost none of its relevance […] but, given the current civilization challenges, it has in fact gained value” (13). It is a fitting, if unplanned, echo of Malinowski’s own ideal of understanding across divides that a mid-Atlantic encounter pervades the volume, with some chapters published in UK English and others in US English.

Works Cited

Eliot, Thomas S. 1922. “London Letter.” The Dial LXXVIII (6): 659–663.

Espagne, Michel, and Annika Haß (eds). 2022. “Wilhelm Wundt et la naissance de l’anthropologie.” Special issue, Revue Germanique Internationale, 35.

Malinowski, Bronisław. 1984 [1922]. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, Long Grove, Waveland Press.

Malinowski, Bronisław. 2002. Dziennik w ścisłym znaczeniu tego wyrazu. Edited by Grażyna Kubica. Wydawnictwo Literackie.

Thornton, Robert J., and Peter Skalník, eds. 1993. The Early Writings of Bronisław Malinowski. Cambridge University Press.

Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy. 1992. The Witkiewicz Reader. Translated and edited by Daniel Gerould. Northwestern University Press.

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This piece was edited by Allegra Giovine and Theo Hughes-Morgan.