ABSTRACT
It is impossible for anyone who was a pupil of Malinowski to write about his work quite impersonally. One has to be able to visualize the histrionic, not to say the exhibitionistic, streak in him to understand the tone of some of his later books. It arose from his view of himself as the leader of a revolutionary movement in anthropology; and such was his magnetism, his wit and his virtuosity that he made us, his pupils, fall in eagerly with that view. This happened in spite of his sometimes offensive prejudices and his impatience of criticism; for he was basically right. But it warped his work. He could not shake off the compulsion to present his theories and his ethnographic discoveries in the form of an assault on the ancien régime. It drove him to wrap up some of his most original ideas and observations in laboured paradoxes and prolix repetition. Coral Gardens (1935) illustrates this. I mention it in particular because the typescript was discussed, page by page, in the seminar of 1932–3 of which I was a member. As the Preface implies, Malinowski regarded it as the Summa Ethnographica of the Trobrianders and, almost by corollary, as the best example of functionalism in action. Malinowski did indeed strain himself and his seminar to make it such an example; and that is perhaps why it shows up so well the blind spots due to his preoccupation with his war against obsolete theories and imputed opposition.
