Volume 9, Number 4 · September 14, 1967
Under the Mosquito Net
By Clifford Geertz
A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term
by Bronislaw Malinowski
Harcourt, Brace & World, 315 pp., $6.95
Coral Gardens and their Magic: I: Soil Tilling and Agricultural Rites in the Trobriand Islands II: The Language of Magic and Gardening
by Bronislaw Malinowski
Indiana University, Vol. 2, 350 pp., $7.50
Ten years ago several eminent anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists who had, in one way or another, been students of Malinowski decided that he had been unjustly neglected since his death in 1942 and put together a collection of essays, each of which was devoted to a particular aspect of his work.[*] But, as the writers were frank and competent, the result did rather more to justify the neglect than to end it. Meyer Fortes of Cambridge decided that although Malinowski wrote about Kinship incessantly, he really didn't understand it. S. F. Nadel indicted his religious studies as a simplistic 'theology of optimism.' J. R. Firth, though sympathetic to his aims, regarded his technical linguistic contribution as consisting of 'sporadic comments immersed and perhaps lost in what is properly called his ethnographic analysis.' Edmund Leach thought his theoretical writings 'not merely dated [but] dead'; Talcott Parsons that he misinterpreted both Durkheim and Freud and had hardly heard of anyone else; Raymond Firth that he failed to grasp economic reasoning; Isaac Schapera that he was unwilling or unable to distinguish law from custom. Only on one point was there unanimous and quite unqualified praise: Malinowski was an incomparable fieldworker. Possessed, in Audrey Richard's words, of 'unusual linguistic gifts, lively powers of personal contact and terrific energy,' he 'achieved a great measure of personal identification with the people he lived with.' Pretentious, platitudinous, unsystematic, simple-minded, long-winded, intellectually provincial, and perhaps even somewhat dishonest, he had, somehow, a way with the natives.
Review, 2544 words
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