Which anthropologist did a re study of the trobriand islanders

About years ago, the first major colonization movements by western Europeans were a result of Portugal, Spain, and England looking for new resources. Colonies were implanted in Africa, Asia, and the New World. A second major colonial movement arose after the Industrial Revolution, motivated in part by a search for cheap labor and resources. Especially in Britain and France, ethnographic research was encouraged as a function of colonialism. Thus, well into the s, anthropologists were employed by colonial offices.

The demise of colonialism and emergence of new independent states gave rise to issues such as plundering of resources, and the new nations produced their own ethnographers whose approaches to anthropology were different from the approaches used by the Euro-American colonial powers. Anthropologists from Mexico, Brazil, and the Indian subcontinent primarily studied their own people. Fortunately, the reign of armchair anthropology was brief.

Around the turn of the twentieth century, anthropologists trained in the natural sciences began to re-imagine what a science of humanity should look like and how social scientists ought to go about studying cultural groups.

Some of those anthropologists insisted that one should at least spend significant time actually observing and talking to the people studied. Early ethnographers such as Alfred Cort Haddon typically traveled to the remote locations where the people in question lived and spent a few weeks to a few months there.

They sought out a local Western host who was familiar with the people and the area such as a colonial official, missionary, or businessman and found accommodations through them. Although they did at times venture into the community without a guide, they generally did not spend significant time with the local people.

Thus, their observations were primarily conducted from the relative comfort and safety of a porch—from their verandas. Malinowski used more innovative ethnographic techniques, and his fieldwork took him off the veranda to study different cultures.

The off the veranda approach is different from armchair anthropology because it includes active participant-observation : traveling to a location, living among people, and observing their day-to-day lives. In , Malinowski traveled to the Trobriand Islands and ended up spending nearly four years conducting fieldwork among the people there. In the process, he developed a rigorous set of detailed ethnographic techniques he viewed as best-suited to gathering accurate and comprehensive ethnographic data.

One of the hallmarks of his method was that it required the researcher to live among the natives. In a well-known book about his research, Argonauts of the Western Pacific , Malinowski described his research techniques and the role they played in his analysis of the Kula ceremony, an exchange of coral armbands and trinkets among members of the social elite.

He concluded that the ceremonies were at the center of Trobriand life and represented the culmination of an elaborate multi-year venture called the Kula Ring that involved dangerous expeditions and careful planning. Ultimately, the key to his discovering the importance of the ceremony was that he not only observed the Kula Ring but also participated in it.

This technique of participant observation is central to anthropological research today. Malinowski did more than just observe people from afar; he actively interacted with them and participated in their daily activities. And unlike early anthropologists who worked through translators, Malinowski learned the native language, which allowed him to immerse himself in the culture. They also collected cultural artifacts, removing property from the communities and placing it in museums and private collections.

Others who were not formally trained in the sciences or in anthropology also participated in salvage activities. Today, anthropologists recognize that human cultures constantly change as people respond to social, political, economic, and other external and internal influences—that there is no moment when a culture is more authentic or more primitive. They acknowledge that culture is fluid and cannot be treated as isolated in time and space. In the throes of salvage ethnography, anthropologists in the first half of the twentieth century actively documented anything and everything they could about the cultures they viewed as endangered.

They collected artifacts, excavated ancient sites, wrote dictionaries of non-written languages, and documented cultural traditions, stories, and beliefs. German-born Franz Boas — , originally trained in physics turned to anthropology after a year-long expedition to Baffin Island, land of the Inuit in the Canadian Arctic.

The Central Eskimo details his time spent on Baffin Island studying the culture and language of the central Eskimo Inuit people. He studied every aspect of their culture such as tools, clothing, and shelters. More than anyone, Boas framed the discipline around the concept of holism : taking a broad view of the historical and cultural foundations of behavior rather than attributing differences to biology. Although he stressed cultural differences, he explained such differences in terms of the historical development of each culture.

It was Boas who grounded the discipline in four fields and founded the American Anthropological Association. A hallmark of the four-field approach is its holistic perspective: anthropologists are interested in studying everything that makes us human.

Thus, they use multiple approaches to understanding humans throughout time and throughout the world. They also acknowledge that to understand people fully one cannot look solely at biology, culture, history, or language; rather, all of those things must be considered. The interrelationships between the four subfields of anthropology are important for many anthropologists today.

Linguistic anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf , for instance, examined interrelationships between culture, language, and cognition. They argued that the language one speaks plays a critical role in determining how one thinks, particularly in terms of understanding time, space, and matter. They proposed that people who speak different languages view the world differently as a result.

In a well-known example, Whorf contrasted the Hopi and English languages. Because verbs in Hopi contained no future or past tenses, Whorf argued that Hopi-speakers understand time in a fundamentally different way than English-speakers. An observation by an English-speaker would focus on the difference in time while an observation by a Hopi-speaker would focus on validity. He also observed that they found it difficult to remember quantities and numbers beyond three even after learning the Portuguese words for such numbers.

Words may not force people to think a particular way, but they can influence our thought processes and how we view the world around us. The holistic perspective of anthropology helps us to appreciate that our culture, language, and physical and cognitive capacities for language are interrelated in complex ways. Boas played an essential role in the development of the concepts of cultural relativism and cultural determinism —that all behavioral differences among peoples result from cultural, not racial or genetic causes.

As he observed on Baffin Island, cultural ideas and practices are shaped through interactions with the natural environment. The cultural traditions of the Inuit were suited for the environment in which they lived. This was an important turning point in correcting the challenge of ethnocentrism in ethnographic fieldwork.

The fight against ethnocentrism—what in the United States today is sometimes called exceptionalism we are always better —is what motivates anthropologists to examine assumptions commonly used by Americans for example, or even embedded in the work of anthropologists themselves.

Indeed, as fieldworkers, anthropologists must understand themselves, understand the eyes doing the recording of others. The participant-observation method of fieldwork was a revolutionary change to the practice of anthropology, but at the same time it presented problems that needed to be overcome.

The challenge was to move away from ethnocentrism, race stereotypes, and colonial attitudes, and to move forward by encouraging anthropologists to maintain high ethical standards and open minds. Does an aversion to conflict affect the record, the choice of research interests? Do the bilingual or bi-cultural characteristics of anthropologists increase sensitivity in the field? The ethnographies that we produce are, in the final analysis, the theory of what we do and why, and what the people we study do and why.

A frequently cited example of an early ethnography employing cultural relativism is by E. Evans-Pritchard — , a British anthropologist who published Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande His study of the Azande of the southern Sudan was meant to indicate why and how Azande beliefs in magic and witchcraft made perfect sense according to Azande premises and to many peoples everywhere who wanted to understand human ills such as disease and death.

The main reason the Azande work is so much cited is that the main discovery is that we are all caught in our premises, our unchallenged assumptions. It must be noted that Boas trained many women anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, knowing that diversifying fieldworkers by including people of all genders was important to successful fieldwork. Ruth Benedict, one of his first female students, used cultural relativism in her research on the cultures of the American northwest and southwest.

Her best-selling book Patterns of Culture emphasized that culture gives people coherent patterns for thinking and behaving.

She argued that culture affects individuals psychologically, shaping individual personality traits and leading the members of a culture to exhibit similar traits such as a tendency toward aggression, or calmness.

Benedict was a professor at Columbia University and in turn greatly influenced her student Margaret Mead, who went on to become one of the most well-known female American cultural anthropologists. Mead was a pioneer in conducting ethnographic research at a time when the discipline was predominately male. The book was an important contribution to the nature versus nurture debate, providing an argument that learned cultural roles were more important than biology.

The book also reinforced the idea that individual emotions and personality traits are products of culture. Anthropologist and famed writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston was the first Black woman to graduate from the Barnard College where she studied anthropology with Boas.

Her deep connections to the southern culture of the American Negro made her an influential writer of folklore and ethnography. Hurston would describe her attraction to anthropology in the folklore collection, Mules and Men It was only when I was off in college, away from my native surroundings that I could see myself like somebody else and stand off and look at my garment. Then I had the spyglass of Anthropology to look through at that. Alfred Louis Kroeber , another student of Boas, also shared the commitment to field research and cultural relativism, but Kroeber was particularly interested in how cultures change over time and influence one another.

Through publications like T he Nature of Culture , Kroeber examined the historical processes that led cultures to emerge as distinct configurations as well as the way cultures could become more similar through the spread or diffusion of cultural traits. Kroeber was also interested in language and the role it plays in transmitting culture.

He devoted much of his career to studying Native American languages in an attempt to document these languages before they disappeared. Kroeber was also the father of the acclaimed fantasy writer Ursula Kroeber LeGuin whose work was deeply influence by growing up in a household of anthropologists. Anthropologists in the United States have used cultural relativism to add depth to the concept of culture in several ways.

Mitchell, a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Vermont; a daughter and son by her first marriage, Linda Hoffman Matisse of Groton, Mass. Click here to download a PDF of the booklet of memories. Skip to Main. Department of Anthropology. Annette Weiner. The cause was cancer, her family said. DOI: One of the better obituaries of Malinowski outlining his contribution to anthropology.

Contains a bibliography of his writings. Stocking, George W. From fieldwork to functionalism: Malinowski and the emergence of British social anthropology.

In After Tylor: British social anthropology — By George W. Stocking Jr. Madison: Univ. Thornton, Robert J. Translated by Ludwik Krzyzanowski. It includes a translation of his doctoral thesis. Urry, James. In Oxford dictionary of national biography. Edited by Henry C. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Available online by subscription.

Young, Michael W. Malinowski: Odyssey of an anthropologist, — Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login. Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here. Not a member? Sign up for My OBO.