ABSTRACT

In introducing a paper on the problems posed for social anthropology in the study of social change, Maurice Bloch recalls Malinowski’s view of what anthropology was all about. It was about, they both suggest, the study of a

long conversation taking place among the people with whom [the anthropologist] lives during field work and in which [he/she] inevitably joins. A long conversation where not only words are exchanged but from time to time also things, animals, people, gestures and blows…The long conversation which the anthropologist observes has begun long before [he / she] came and indeed it has begun long before any of the people the anthropologist meets have been born. (Bloch, 1977:278)

For Malinowski, everything was to be found in this long conversation. It was the locus for an understanding of the way the past affects the present and is expressed through it.