Bronisław Malinowski summary

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Bronisław Malinowski, (born April 7, 1884, Kraków, Pol., Austria-Hungary—died May 16, 1942, New Haven, Conn., U.S.), Polish-British anthropologist. He is principally associated with studies of the peoples of Oceania and with the school of thought known as functionalism. After taking degrees in philosophy, physics, and mathematics in Poland, Malinowski happened upon James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough and went to study anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (1910–16). Doing research in the Trobriand Islands, he lived in a tent among the people (see Trobriander), spoke the vernacular fluently, recorded “texts” freely on the scene as well as in set interviews, and observed reactions with an acute clinical eye. He was thus able to present a dynamic picture of social institutions that clearly separated ideal norms from actual behaviour and in doing so laid much of the basis for modern anthropological field research. He taught at the London School of Economics (1922–38) and Yale University (1938–42). He wrote several works that are now considered classics of anthropology, including Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and Magic, Science and Religion (1948).

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cultural anthropology Summary

Cultural anthropology, a major division of anthropology that deals with the study of culture in all of its aspects and that uses the methods, concepts, and data of archaeology, ethnography and ethnology, folklore, and linguistics in its descriptions and analyses of the diverse peoples of the world.