

His command of languages included Polish, Russian, German, French, English, Italian, and Spanish, as well as the languages of tribal groups he studied. In 1939, when World War II erupted, he was teaching at Yale University. During visits to the United States, Malinowski studied the Pueblo Indians in 1926 and lectured at Cornell University in 1933. He lectured in Geneva, Vienna, Rome, and Oslo. At Harvard University's tercentenary in 1936 he received an honorary doctoral degree. There he earned the doctor of science degree in 1916, was appointed reader in anthropology in 1924, and held the university's first chair in anthropology in 1927. He first lectured at the University of London's School of Economics in 1913. Brief study at the University of Leipzig under Karl Bücher and Wilhelm Wundt was followed in 1910 by further study in anthropology at the London School of Economics under C. While ill he read Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, which turned his interest to anthropology. His father was a professor of Slavic languages.īronislaw attended Cracow's King John Sobieski public school and the Jagellonian University, earning in 1908 the doctoral degree in physics and mathematics. He stressed the pragmatic functioning of human institutions within a culture.īronislaw Malinowski was born on April 7, 1884, in Krakow, then in a part of Poland belonging to Austria. Kaspar Bronislaw Malinowski founded the functional school of anthropology. Malinowski died in New Haven, Connecticut, on May 14, 1942.

In focusing on these and other cultural factors as functional parts of a nicely balanced system, he founded the so-called functional school of social anthropology and helped transform speculative anthropology into a modern science of man. Malinowski emphasized the function of such cultural characteristics as custom, ritual, religion, sexual taboos, institutions, ceremonies, and beliefs. The most able responded with greater effort and often with self-assertive anger mixed with admiration and devotion. He encouraged beginning students but was often intentionally devastatingly critical as they became more advanced. He attracted students with various career goals, particularly colonial civil servants, and trained and directed the field research of a generation of social anthropologists.


He lectured in Geneva, Vienna, Rome, and Oslo.ĭuring visits to the United States, Malinowski studied the Pueblo Indians in 1926 and lectured at Cornell University in 1933.
