Bronisław Malinowski > Quotes

“…freedom in its essence is the acceptance of the chains which suit you and for which you are suited, and of the harness in which you pull towards an end chosen and valued by yourself, and not imposed. It is not, and never can be, the absence of restrictions, obligations or law and of duty.”
― Bronislaw Malinowski, Freedom and Civilization

“...yesterday, returning from Wawela I had some ethnological ideas, but I can't remember what they were.”
― Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term

“The time when we could tolerate accounts presenting us the native as a distorted, childish caricature of a human being are gone. This picture is false, and like many other falsehoods, it has been killed by Science.”
― Bronisław Malinowski

“Again, they have no idea of what could be called the evolution of the world or the evolution of society; that is, they do not look back towards a series of successive changes, which happened in nature or in humanity, as we do. We, in our religious and scientific outlook alike, know that earth ages and that humanity ages, and we think of both in these terms; for them, both are eternally the same, eternally youthful.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts Of The Western Pacific - An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea - With 5 maps, 65 Illustrations ... in Economics and Political Science)

“Ethnology or Anthropology, the science of Man, must not shun him in his innermost self, in his instinctive and emotional life.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts Of The Western Pacific - An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea - With 5 maps, 65 Illustrations ... in Economics and Political Science)

“If once we come to the point of doing away with the individual family as the pivotal element of our society, we should be faced with a social catastrophe compared with which the political upheaval of the French Revolution and the economic changes of Bolshevism are insignificant.”
― Bronisław Malinowski

“Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.”
― Bronisław Malinowski

“The whole concept of European culture as a cornucopia from which things are freely given is misleading. It does not take a specialist in anthropology to see that the European “give” is always highly selective. We never give any native people under our control – and we never shall, for it would be sheer folly as long as we stand on the basis of our present Realpolitik – the following elements of culture:

1. The instruments of physical power: fire-arms, bombing planes, poison gas, and all that makes an effective defence or aggression possible
2. We do not give out instruments of political mastery [i.e. sovereignty or voting rights]
3. We do not share with them the substance of economic wealth and advantages…. Even when under indirect economic exploitation… we allow the native a share of the profits, the full control of the economic organization remains in the hands of Western enterprise.
4. We do not admit them as equals to Church, Assembly, school, or drawing room… Full political, social and even religious equality is nowhere granted.”
― Bronisław Malinowski

“There is no doubt that the destiny of indigenous races has been tragic in the process of contact with European invasion… The historian of the future will have to register that Europeans in the past sometimes exterminated whole island peoples; that they expropriated most of the patrimony of savage races; that they introduced slavery in a specially cruel and pernicious form; and that even if they abolished it later, they treated the expatriated Negroes as outcasts and pariahs.”
― Bronisław Malinowski

“There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added, any savage races lacking in either the scientific attitude, or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them.”
― Bronisław Malinowski

“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different ; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behaviour and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by what these people live, of realising the substance of their happiness—is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific

“Beyond doubt, my love for her was one of the purest, most romantic things in my life. Friendship for her? If she were healthy, strong? No — her way of taking life would be impossible for me. Entirely impossible. We would have talked to each other as though shouting from different rooms. And yet I feel regrets. If I could cancel it all out, and never possess her soul?”
― Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strictest Sense of the Term

“So acts every ‘man-in-the-street’ in our own society, so has acted the average member of any society through the past ages, and so acts the present-day savage; and the lower his level of cultural development, the greater stickler he will be for good manners, propriety and form, and the more incomprehensive and odious to him will be the non-conforming point of view.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific

“If we insist that war is a fight between two independent and politically organized groups, war does not occur at the primitive level.”
― Bronislaw Malinowski

“Living in the village with no other business but to follow native life, one sees the customs, ceremonies and transactions over and over again, one has examples of their beliefs as they are actually lived through, and the full body and blood of actual native life fills out soon the skeleton of abstract constructions.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea

“—these are enviable failings or sins, dangerous, since they arouse the jealousy of the mighty,”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society

“black magic is regarded as the chief’s principal instrument in the enforcement of his exclusive privileges and prerogatives.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society

“The metaphysical laws of existence are not yet considered subject to one invariable truth.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea

“Magic plays an extremely important part in everything which these natives do.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society

“The true problem is not to study how human life submits to rules —it simply does not; the real problem is how the rules become adapted to life.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society

“Wracam do mego stosunku do Anglii i rzeczy angielskich. Bezwarunkowo nie jestem bynajmniej wyjątkiem w tym, że miałem wysoce rozwiniętą anglomanię, jakiś prawie że mistyczny kult dla kultury brytyjskiej i jej przedstawicieli. Mam wrażenie, że wytworzyło się to u mnie w pierwszym rzędzie skutkiem bezpośredniego wrażenia, jakie na mnie Anglicy robili. Podróżowałem dość dużo - przed przyjazdem do Wielkiej Brytanii i za granicą spotykałem oczywiście wszędzie dużo Anglików. Bezpośrednie i zupełnie przygniatające wrażenie nieopisanego szyku, wyższości w wyglądzie, manierach, ruchach - wszystko to stawiało mi Anglików na jakimś piedestale, otaczało nimbem tego nieuchwytnego atrybutu, który określamy wyrazami "rasa", "arystokratyczność" - atrybuty, który musi być wynikiem zasadniczych cech duszy ludzkiej, skoro zeń płyną wszystkie uczucia snobizmu, megalomanii towarzyskiej, a nawet cały ustrój "towarzystwa". Anglicy byli dla mnie, jednym słowem, arystokracją narodów, byli jako naród tym, czym jest "towarzystwo" w danym społeczeństwie.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term

“This goal is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea

“Let us now turn to the second class of myths, those referring to certain big cultural achievements brought about by heroic deeds and important adventures.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society

“Zanadto wlazłem w towarzystwo, które tu kwitnie. Ciągle zadaję się z Francuzką i drem franc[uskim] (Żydkiem) z pierwszej oraz
z małpą australską, wobec której wypuszczam zresztą dużo snobizmu naukowego.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term

“Tanto la magia como la religión surgen y funcionan en momentos de carácter emotivo: las crisis de
la vida, los fracasos en empresas importantes, la muerte y la iniciación en los misterios de la tribu, el amor infortunado o el odio insatisfecho. Tanto la magia como la religión presentan soluciones ante esas situaciones y atolladeros, ofreciendo no un modo empírico de salir con bien de los tales, sino los ritos y la
fe en el dominio de lo sobrenatural.”
― Bronislaw Malinowski

“In the Christian Aryan societies, however, pregnancy among the lower classes is made a burden, and regarded as a nuisance;”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Sex and Repression in Savage Society

“Boasting about food is the most prevalent form of native vanity or ambition.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands

“If the affair is carried on sub rosa with a certain amount of decorum, and if no one in particular stirs up trouble —’public opinion’ will gossip, but not demand any harsh punishment. If, on the contrary, scandal breaks out —every one turns against the guilty pair and by ostracism and insults one or the other may be driven to suicide.”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Crime and Custom in Savage Society

“The final goal of which an ethnographer should never lose sight…is, briefly, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world”
― Bronisław Malinowski

“the main instrument for wielding power and inflicting penalties in these lands, sorcery,”
― Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea