Beginnings (17)—Argonauts of the Western Pacific

Click here for the introduction to Round and Square's Beginnings theme.

[a] Coastal  RF

This is the big one—the beginning that started social (and cultural) anthropology. I exaggerate, slightly, for effect, but Malinowski's work cast a very long shadow on the growing discipline. As you may have seen many weeks ago in an "endings" post on Malinowski, his introduction, middle (it is formidable), and conclusion defined ethnography for decades. I am quoting large swaths of the first three sections of the introduction, because its influence on anthropologists old and young cannot be underestimated. Year after year, my students read these introductory lines (and the nineteen pages that follow) with fascination. Although the rhetoric of science gives the passage a somewhat dated quality, the texture of these passages is so thick, so rich, that it is hard not to admire it. 

All I ask is for you to give it a read. Imagine that it is 1922, and all of anthropology hangs in the balance.

[b] Trobriand  PD

Bronislaw Malinowski

Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922)

INTRODUCTION

THE SUBJECT, METHOD AND SCOPE OF THIS INQUIRY

I

The coastal populations of the South Sea Islands, with very few exceptions are, or were before their extinction, expert navigators and traders. Several of them had evolved excellent types of large sea-going canoes, and used to embark in them on distant trade expeditions or raids of war and consequence...Definite forms of exchange along definite trade routes are to be found established between the various tribes...This trading system, the Kula, is the subject I am setting out to describe in this volume, and it will be seen that it is an economic phenomenon of considerable theoretical importance. It looms paramount in the tribal life of those natives who live within its circuit, and it importance is fully realised by the tribesmen themselves, whose ideas, ambitions, desires, and vanities are very much bound up with the Kula.

II

Before proceeding to the account of the Kula, it will be well to give a description of the methods used in the collecting of the ethnographic material. The results of scientific research in any branch of learning ought to be presented in a manner absolutely candid and above board. No one would dream of making experimental contributions to physical or chemical science, without giving a detailed account...In less exact sciences, as in biology or geology, this cannot be done as rigorously, but every student will do his best to bring home to the reader all the conditions in which the experiment or the observations were made. In Ethnography, where a candid account of such data is perhaps even more necessary, it has unfortunately in the past not always been supplied with sufficient generosity, and many writers do not ply the full searchlight of methodological sincerity, as they move among their facts but produce them before us out of complete obscurity....

In Ethnography, the writer is his own chronicler and the historian at the same time, while his sources are no doubt easily accessible, but also supremely elusive and complex; they are not embodied in fixed, material documents, but in the behaviour and in the memory of living men. In Ethnography, the distance is often enormous between the brute material of information—as it is presented to the student in his own observations, in native statement, in the kaleidoscope of tribal life—and the final authoritative presentation of the results. The Ethnographer has to traverse this distance in the laborious years between the moment he sets foot upon a native beach, and makes his first attempt to get into touch with the natives, and the time when he writes down the final version of his results. A brief outline of an Ethnographer's tribulations, as lived through by myself, may throw more light on the question, than any long abstract discussion could do.

III

Imagine yourself suddenly set down surrounded by all your gear, alone on a tropical beach close to a native village, while the launch or dinghy which has brought you sails away out of sight. Since you take up your abode in the compound of some neighbouring white man, trader, or missionary, you have nothing to do, but to start at once on your ethnographic work. Imagine further that you are a beginner, without previous experience, with nothing to guide you and no one to help you. For the white man is temporarily absent, or else unable or unwilling to waste any time of his own on you. This exactly describes my first initiation into field work on the south coast of New Guinea. I will remember the long visits I paid to the village during the first weeks; the feeling of hopelessness and despair after many obstinate but futile attempts had entirely failed to bring me into real touch with the natives, or supply me with any material. I had periods of despondency, when I buried myself in the reading of novels, as a man might take to drink in a fit of tropical depression and boredom.

[c] From the beach   RF

Imagine yourself then making your first entry into the village, alone or in company with your white cicerone. Some natives flock round you, especially if they smell tobacco. Others, the more dignified and elderly, remain seated where they are. Your white companion has his routine way of treating the natives, and he neither understands, nor is very much concerned with, the manner in which you, as an ethnographer, will have to approach them. The first visit leaves you with a hopeful feeling that when you return alone, things will be easier. Such was my hope at least.

I came back duly, and soon gathered an audience around me. A few compliments in pidgin-English on both sides, some tobacco changing hands, induced an atmosphere of mutual amiability. I tried then to proceed to business. First, to begin with subjects which might arouse no suspicion, I started to "do" technology. A few natives were engaged in manufacturing some object or other. It was easy to look at it and obtain the names of the tools, and even some technical expressions about the proceedings, but there the matter ended. It must be borne in mind that pidgin-English is a very imperfect instrument for expressing one's ideas, and that before one gets a good training in framing questions and understanding answers one has the uncomfortable feeling that free communication in it with the natives will never be attained; and I was quite unable to enter into any more detailed or explicit conversation with them at first. I knew well that the best remedy for this was to collect concrete data, and accordingly I took a village census, wrote down genealogies, drew up plans and collected terms of kinship. But all this remained dead material, which led no further into the understanding of real native mentality or behaviour, since I could neither procure a good native interpretation of any of these items, nor get what could be called a hang of tribal life. As to obtaining their ideas about religion and magic, their beliefs in sorcery and spirits, nothing was forthcoming except a few superficial items of folk-lore, mangled by being forced into pidgin English.

Information which I received from some white residents in the district, valuable as it was in itself, was more discouraging than anything else with regard to my own work. Here were men who had lived for years in the place with constant opportunities for observing the natives and communicating with them, and who yet hardly know one thing about them really well. How could I therefore in a few months or a year, hope to overtake and go beyond them? Moreover, the manner in which my white informants spoke about the natives and put their views was, naturally, that of untrained minds, unaccustomed to formulate their thoughts with any degree of consistency and precision. And they were for the most part, naturally enough, full of biassed and pre-judged opinions inevitable in the average practical man whether administrator, missionary, or trader, yet so strongly repulsive to a mind striving after the objective, scientific view of things. The habit of treating with a self-satisfied frivolity what is really serious to the ethnographer; the cheap rating of what to him is a scientific treasure, that is to say, the native's cultural and mental peculiarities and independence—these features so well known in the inferior amateur's writing, I found in the tone of the majority of white residents.*
 *I may note at once that there were a few delightful exceptions to that, to mention only my friends Billy Hancock in the Trobriands; M. Raffael Brudo, another pear trader; and the missionary, Mr. M. K. Gilmour.

Indeed, in my first piece of Ethnographic research on the South coast, it was not until I was alone in the district that I began to make some headway; and, at any rate, I found out where lay the secret of effective field-work. What is then this ethnographer's magic by which he is able to evoke the real spirit of the natives, the true picture of tribal life? As usual, success can only be obtained by a patient and systematic application of a number of rules of common sense and well-known scientific principles, and not by the discovery of any marvellous short-cut leading to the desired results without effort or trouble. The principles of method can be grouped under three main headings; first of all, naturally, the student must possess real scientific aims and know the values and criteria of modern ethnography. Secondly, he ought to put himself in good conditions of work, that is, in the main, to live without other white men, right among the natives. Finally, he has to apply a number of special methods of collecting, manipulating and fixing his evidence. A few words must be said about these three foundation stones of field-work, beginning with the second and most elementary.[1]

And on it goes for twenty-five pages that "created" ethnography as a discipline, and that is just the introduction to a 518-page ethnography—RL for RSQ

[1] Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (Long Grove IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1984), 1-6.


Bibliography
Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Long Grove IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1984.