October 1-3: Bronislaw the Magnificent
| ANTH 565: ETHNOGRAPHY AS SCIENCE AND LITERATURE October 1-3: Bronislaw the Magnificent |
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October 1: The man and his works It's hard to know where to begin with Malinowski; probably the greatest anthropologist of all time, he invented fieldwork as we know it, wrote the first fieldwork-based ethnography, apparently disliked the people he wrote about, raised many of the important questions about society and culture that we still argue over today, and was pretty awful to his lovers, wives, daughters, and colleagues. Most relevant to our discussion of ethnography as science and literature, he considered himself a scientist--his initial background was in the physical sciences--and he was a brilliant writer in English, German, French, and I suppose particularly Polish, though I don't read Polish. Of Malinowski's works, my own favorite is The Sexual Life of Savages (it would be fun to read in a public place with the title showing conspicuously, and do a little ethnography of people's reactions), but I've decided this time to go with Argonauts of the Western Pacific, which is generally considered the archetypal "Malinowskian Ethnography." For Monday, since you've got five days to work on it, read Argonauts and post a commentary on the book. I'm not giving you any more exact instructions than that; I want to see your initial reactions, gut or otherwise. These should give us plenty to talk about in class October 3: Some critiques and evaluations For Wednesday, we have a bunch of secondary material to help put this all in context. First read an encomium by one of Malinowski's most prominent students, Sir Raymond Firth. Then read Chapter 20, Kiriwina and Chapter 24, Return to the Islands from Michael Young's wonderful first biographical volume, Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884-1920. Then read the review of Young's book by James Urry. Then post a comment on the relationship of Malinowski's personality and his intellectual background to the way he wrote Argonauts, and the implications that this might have for understanding how and why specific ethnographic works are written. |