ABSTRACT
It is almost 60 years since in the autumn of 19241 came as a graduate student to the London School of Economics, to read in economics. But in New Zealand as an amateur anthropologist I had read Argonauts of the Western Pacific with admiration, and soon decided to throw in my lot with anthropology under Malinowski’s guidance. If I say little about Malinowski on this centenary occasion it is because I have already written fairly fully about him, as in a recent essay in which I tried to relate his theories to his personality (Firth 1981; see also 1957). But here I do want briefly to indicate once again the nature of my debt to him in ethnography.
