Born in 1885 into a distinguished family of Kraków aristocrats and intellectuals, Bronislaw Malinowski was originally educated in the hard sciences of mathematics and physics. Sometime in his early twenties he suffered a physical crisis and was advised by his physician that the nervous strain of his studies could overwhelm his fragile constitution. Famous photographs of the man in later life suggest immediately, even to my untrained eyes, why his doctors were concerned: he was a thin-lipped, owl-eyed creature with a long, beaky nose, hollow cheeks, and a very high forehead receding into thin, worried hair. It is the face of an intensely intelligent sparrow or badger. The striking thing about many of these photographs is the contrast between this nervous, high-strung little man and his surroundings: Malinowski is photographed on the most mellow tropical beach imaginable. He is dressed in a round pith helmet and shorts. Tall palms sway in the distance. The sand is white, and a gentle wave is breaking on a gentle shore. Malinowski is surrounded by the natives, who regard him with affectionate, tolerant, bemused stares: the women stand topless, with large pendulous breasts reaching almost to their grass skirts; men and women, black as coal, sport enormous, simply stunning afros. Some of the afros must be a foot of hair in every direction — which makes sense, given that the people of the Trobriand Islands didn't have scissors. The sun is very bright. Malinowski looks miserable.
Malinowski found himself in those tropical islands — the Trobriand Islands, as it happened, off the coast of New Guinea, a place which even the Australians considered impossibly remote and horrible — having been beguiled, as the natives might have said, by the magical influence of a great sorcerer, the Englishman Sir James Frazier, whose contagion was transmitted via Malinowski to Joseph Atkinson, then again to Martiya van der Leun. Having been denied the pleasures of mathematics and physics by his doctors, it was to Frazier's The Golden Bough that Malinowski turned for diversion and consolation; and it was after reading Frazier, with his long lists of fascinating and barely comprehensible primitive rites and rituals, that Malinowski conceived a desperate urge to see a preliterate culture with his own eyes. For unless we understood our own culture, Frazier convinced Malinowski, we could not possibly understand ourselves; and we simply cannot understand our culture from the inside. "We cannot possibly reach the final Socratic wisdom of knowing ourselves if we never leave the narrow confinement of the customs, beliefs, and prejudices into which every man is born," Malinowski wrote, explaining his desire to live in the South Seas. By removing himself entirely from his own society and living with the people of the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski proposed to come to know himself. The greater the immersion in Trobriand society, the more profound his own insights would be. The result of such immersion would be an ethnography, on the one hand, a real contribution to the world's knowledge of its inhabitants, an exhaustive description of a people; and, on the other hand, a transformation of the observer's soul.
That, at any rate, was the theory.
But there is something in those photographs of Malinowski on the beach that isn't quite right, a kind of vague grimace on Malinowski's face. The man looks … constipated. Hideously so, as if it's been weeks since he snuck off to fertilize the jungle, and he's carrying around way more tribal soup than he's comfortable with, and it's hot, really hot, the kind of hot that makes you feel woozy, and it's not even ten in the morning yet; he's sunburned, and he's cranky, and there is sand everywhere, and those people were banging on drums all night long, don't they know any other rhythm than thumpety-thump-thump, and the nearest effective purgative is on the other side of the Pacific Ocean.
Could the opium from his medicine kit be interfering with his digestion? Perhaps.
The impression offered by the photographs is not mistaken. Malinowski — the most famous ethnographer in the history of anthropology, a man said to be possessed (by his contemporary R. R. Marat) of the uncanny ability to wriggle his way into the soul of even the shyest savage — was, in fact, miserable. In 1967, Malinowski's widow, doing the reputation of her late husband absolutely no favors, published the diaries he kept while working in the Trobriands. The truth was out: it seems that Malinowski didn't love anthropological fieldwork quite as much as everyone thought. Malinowski, to judge by his own words, loathed the Trobriand Islands, and detested the Trobriand Islanders. "As for ethnology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog," Malinowski confided to himself. The natives are variously referred to in the diaries as "fuzzy-headed savages" and "brutes." There are stories in which Malinowski strikes recalcitrant locals. Fieldwork, even for the great Malinowski, was terribly boring, frustrating, dangerous, difficult, enervating, and lonely. Forcing himself to quit the mosquito nets every morning and interview one more damned naked savage about the magical rites found in the coral gardens takes the full measure of Malinowski's discipline. "At bottom," Malinowski wrote, "I am living outside of Kiriwina … strongly hating the niggers."*
There is in this something that confirms common sense: no liberation of the spirit should come easy.
The Curiosity saved him. Malinowski, however much he may have disliked island life, spent the better part of five years living with the Tro
*After the publication of the diaries, students of the history of anthropology returned to Kiriwina and asked elderly natives to recall Malinowski. In stark contrast to the self-portrait offered up by the diaries, Malinowski seems to have been a beloved figure among the villagers: endlessly inquisitive, charming, patient, willing to talk with anyone about anything for hours. Only his intelligence was put in doubt: the man barely knew which end of the tuber to put in the ground.
briand Islanders because the Curiosity had seized him. He had noticed a Very Strange Thing — and if he wished to understand it, there were no books of which he could avail himself, no authorities to consult. The only way to satisfy the Curiosity and understand the Very Strange Thing was to stay on the island and ask more questions. The literature of anthropology is absolutely thick with such stories: the exotic location, the deep boredom, the malarial fever, the muffled cry—"As God is my witness, I will get off of this rock!" — then some small element in the local culture that quickens the pulse. The unpleasantness of the local life is forgotten or ignored as the Curiosity takes hold; a hitherto-unknown hot monomania bubbles and steams in the anthropologist's previously tepid soul.
The Very Strange Thing that Malinowski noticed was a practice called kula. It is a captivatingly simple idea. For the inhabitants of the village in which he was ensconced, Malinowski noticed, far and away the most beloved of a man's possessions were his necklaces and armbands; indeed, so valuable were a man's necklaces and armbands that they were never, ever, worn, the armbands in any case being too small even for a child. Whatever the appeal of the necklaces and armbands, it was certainly not to Malinowski's eyes an aesthetic attraction: they were brutish-looking handmade things, bits of shells strung on a rope. In his book, he published pictures of the necklaces and armbands: they are the sort of things that David Walker might well have found on sale outside a Grateful Dead show, handmade by a girl named Moonbeam.