A formidable personality in life, Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) is still a somewhat controversial figure, long after his death. Born in Poland, he was educated there through the PhD level, receiving his degree in 1908. Subsequently, he travelled to Leipzig to study with †Wilhelm Wundt, notable both as a pioneering experimental psychologist and as a student of Völkerpsychologie, and Karl Bücher, an economist with special interest in primitive societies, and then won a Polish fellowship for prospective university teachers which took him to Britain in 1910 to study anthropology with †Edward Westermarck and †C.G.Seligman at the London School of Economics. He received his DSc in 1916 on the basis of a library study published in 1913, The Family Among the Australian Aborigines, as well a report on his first fieldwork published in 1915, The Natives of Mailu. He spent most of his career at the LSE, where he first lectured in 1913, became reader in social anthropology in 1923 and professor in 1927—the only one in the subject at a major British university at the time.
He was a founder of the *functionalist school of social anthropology, and its undisputed leader in Britain until 1937, when *A.R.Radcliffe-Brown became professor at Oxford after years in academic exile. His training programme revolved around his famously lively seminars, which attracted many who were not formally his students. Most of the leaders of British social anthropology in the post-World War II era were his disciplinary progeny (a number were to adopt Radcliffe-Brown as their intellectual mentor, however); and these were the first generation of anthropologists able to be professionals—who enjoyed careers in academe and wrote largely for other social scientists rather than amateur enthusiasts—in no small part because Malinowski’s promotional efforts encouraged proliferation of academic positions. And Malinowski’s influence was global, for he attracted many foreign students, and many recipients of PhD degrees from the LSE found employment outside Britain. In 1939 he secured an appointment at Yale University, determined to remain outside Europe for the duration of World War II; he died in New Haven (see Firth 1957, Thornton and Skalník 1993).
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