This first great anthropological field worker squarely faced the problem of running experiences such as those of Hans Staden.
Malinowski was a Polish gentleman and an Austro-Hungarian project doing field work on the South Seas when World War I broke out in 1914.
Austria-Hungary was at war with Great Britain, and one legend has it that he was caught as an enemy alien on the Trobriand Islands, territory controlled by Australia, and was forbidden to leave.
He also made two expeditions to the islands from Australian mainland during the two subsequent years.
All told, his Trobriand expeditions are among the most extensive field trips ever taken. As a result, he published a number of very brilliant books from 1916 through the 1920s.
Malinowski was only a paper enemy as far as the British were concerned. He was sponsored by a major anthropologist, C. G Seligman from England.
He did very well socially, marrying the daughter of the governor general of Australian and later winning a chair at the London School of Economics, certainly a prize position during that period.
There, in the 1920s, he was to found the intellectual school called ‘functionalism.’
Bronislaw Malinowski
