ABSTRACT
SOME NAMES fix the scientific climate of their time, in that whole periods are known by them or whole ways of looking at the world. In physics there are Galileo, Newton, and Einstein; in zoology and biology, Darwin and Mendel; and Freud’s name covers a whole approach to the human personality, even when particular theories within this approach do not agree with his formulations. In the social sciences there are perhaps only Marx and Keynes; but in the 1920s and early 1930s, it seemed that Malinowski might rank with these giants. He had a dominant fertilizing influence on his own subject, anthropology, and on all the social sciences and psychology; philosophers, novelists, students of linguistics, every kind of intellectual, was affected by his writings. Yet since the last war, he is hardly mentioned in intellectual discussion. I find it difficult to convey to my own students how important he was when I studied at a South African University, for even at that distance, far from his personal influence as a teacher, he seemed to offer a new way of understanding the life of men in society.
