ABSTRACT
Bronislaw Malinowski’s high standing in the history of anthropology is of course based primarily on his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands during World War I. The ambiguities of Malinowski’s intellectual foundations can be detected in the major posthumous publications, which document his fascination with the concept of culture and his general political creed and values. Like Malinowski, Ernest Gellner initially studied philosophy and was attracted to rigorous empiricism. In his ethnographic work in Morocco and voluminous other writings he is generally more concerned with structure in a Radcliffe-Brownian sense than with the details of culture, which he tended to dismiss as mere ‘wallpaper’. Johann Gottfried Herder has long been viewed as a pivotal figure in the Counter-Enlightenment, leading a reaction against the philosophers of Paris and Konigsberg and pointing towards romanticism, populism, and movements of national liberation in Europe and elsewhere. Herder made a famous analogy between a ‘people’ and a sphere, which had its own unique centre of gravity.
