Bronislaw Malinowski 1884 - 1942

1. Bronislaw Malinowski 1884 - 1942 ---was born in Krakow, Poland on April 7, 1884 and became influential in British anthropology and is the founder of Functionalism. His first field study came in 1915-18 (Trobriand Islanders of New Guinea in the southwest Pacific). He used a holistic approach in studying the native’s social interactions including the annual Kula Ring Exchange, (to be associated with magic, religion, kinship and trade). He died in 1942. The Trobriand Islands (1915) Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) The Scientific Theory of Culture (1922) Magic, Science, and Religion (1948) The Dynamics of Culture Change (1961)

2. KEY WORDS: The ethnographic process, Dene, Trobrianders Emic Approach: local-oriented approach to anthropological investigations. Etic Approach: Scientific-oriented approach to anthropological investigations. Paradigm: a pattern or model of thought.

3. Key words (cont) Ethnographic Realism: presenting an accurate, objective, scientific account of a different way of life, written by someone who knew it first hand. Ethnographic Present: the period before Westernization, when “true” Native culture flourished. (Eternal qualities of timelessness given to Native cultures). Positionality: situated knowledge produced by positioned actors

4. This lesson has three objectives: 1st to start to understand the dilemma of every anthropologist in the field: 2ndto position the ethnographer not only as someone recording the life of a society or culture but also as someone who both affects that life and is affected by it And 3rd to be aware of how the relationship between ethnographic fieldwork and the ethnographer affects not only the process of fieldwork but its product (ethnography)

5. Why? Why do we need to know about these ethnographic dynamics and its effects? 1. so that we as students of anthropology start the process of understanding that context (who we are as ethnographers and who they are as subjects of our studies) is not detached from content (what we say about a particular culture) the representation of the ethnographic process.

6. Malinowski developed three standard themes in all his ethnographies First: aspects of cultures cannot be studied in isolation; they must be understood in the context of heir use (he was not talking about historical context but social context and cultural context that he saw separate from historical context (colonialism, etc).

7. Second of Malinowski Ethnographic Themes Second: he established the principle that one cannot over rely on the informal descriptions of people because people may say one thing and do another.

8. The third of Malinowski’s Ethnographic Themes Third: when one put the “primitive’ action into its proper context (cultural particularism) one would understand that his action is reasonable.

9. The key elements of the method of participant observation developed by Malinowski and utilized by anthropologists even today usually involves the following:

10. a. Living in the context for an extended period of time b. Learning and using local languages and dialect c. Actively participating in a wide range of daily; routine and extraordinary activities with people in that context.

11. d. Using everyday conversations as interview techniques ---Informally observing during leisure activities (hanging out) e. Recording observations in the field notes (usually organized chronologically) and; f. Using both tacit and explicit information in analysis and writing

12. Marie Francoise Guedon Studied Dene of Alaska (60’s 70’s) and other Indigenous communities in North America Dene Ways and the Ethnographer’s Culture (1998) In the book: Being Changed by Cross-Cultural Encounters (Young and Goulet1998)

13. Discussion Question How and why does the process of learning and understanding a culture’s language, concepts, practices, categories, rules etc. change both ethnography as a method and the ethnographer as a person?