Malinowski Off the Verandah: Strangers Abroad Documentary

[00:00:16][Music] imagine yourself suddenly sit down surrounded by all your gear alone on a tropical beach close to a native village by the launch which has brought you sails away out of sight imagine further you are a beginner without previous experience nothing to guide you and no one to help you for the white man is absent this exactly describes my first initiation into fieldwork those words were written by a young Polish academic called Branislav malinovski at the beginning of his famous account of native life in the western Pacific [Music] no one had probed so deeply into the lives of so called savages no one spoke with such authority he was brilliant dazzling egotistical controversial and at the height of his powers a generation of students were about to be drawn to his lectures from all over the world to learn his methods and hear his theories I think he was the greatest devil was he was so emotionally superior - - Fraser who sort of thought of as D anthropologist in the previous era also I think for a whole generation throughout most of my active career he established as I said there's a jar of how to do anthropology malinovski was born into an aristocratic family in Cracow Poland in 1884 his father was a university professor and he himself had a glittering career as an undergraduate going on to take his doctorate in physics and mathematics he was however much closer to his mother and she read him pages from phrases the Golden Bough during a period of illness these volumes had been read outside anthropological circles and had widely popularized the subject they also inspired malinovski to take a serious look at anthropology he decided he wanted to make contact with English anthropologists particularly for names come to mind rivers whi rivers at Cambridge and Haddon Alfred court Hatton at Cambridge and at at London at London School of Economics Charles Seligman and Edward Westermarck malinovski arrived in England in 1910 in pursuit of a romance and anthropological training he was admitted to the London School of Economics where he was laid to spend the greatest years of his teaching life he was obviously seen as a promising student as his professors raised funding for him to do further study abroad the area he chose meant traveling by way of us raelia and for the next three years that country already a center for anthropological studies was to play a prominent part in the shaping of his career and the destiny of British anthropology when the British Association for the Advancement of science held its 1914 meeting here in Melbourne malinovski was one of those who made the six-week voyage to attend and in several ways Australia was to play an important part in his life he'd obtained his passage out here as secretary to the anthropology section of the meeting the favorable impression of his early work on the family among the Australian Aborigines must have played a part in helping him secure that post Aborigines were still the focus of much of the theoretical attention of anthropologists but it was the calibre of the anthropologists themselves who were involved in giving papers and discussing the issues of the day that must have influenced the way that malinovski was to approach his own fieldwork Hadden who had engineered the Cambridge expedition to the Torres Straits and rivers who had brought a scientific approach to anthropology with his work among the Tatars were both here and so too was bored with Spencer that pioneer of Australian Aboriginal studies whose work malinovski knew well the collective experience of these great men and of attending the conference made malinovski realized that the next important step for anthropology was a thorough in-depth study of native life someone had to get to know what these savages were really like after six weeks of listening and talking to the leading anthropologists of the day malinovski went out to the field it had been suggested that he study the Milo people on Toulon Island so as the delegates headed for home and the grim prospect of a war in Europe malinovski left for his first attempt at fieldwork off the south coast of New Guinea among the volumes he took along to read was a copy of that favorite handbook for those investigating native life notes and queries on anthropology he had the latest edition in which William rivers had laid out his special approach to the methods for collecting information it's important to realize just how revolutionary a step it was for anthropologists to actually go and visit the cultures they were interested in rather than just staying at home sitting in an armchair rearranging other people's facts now they could go out during the day witness ceremonies find interpreters to interview the natives and come home in the evening and write up their notes whilst things were still fresh in their minds anthropology had if you like to move from the armchair out onto the veranda it was from a veranda like this on the island of milu off the south coast of New Guinea that Branislav malinovski did some of his early field research it was the beginning of a life's work that was to make him one of the world's most important anthropologists but he soon realized that he wasn't getting a full picture of native life from a perspective like this in fact he wasn't taking part in their daily lives and he realized that to do this he had to come down off the veranda and actually go and live with the natives themselves my anthropology collects patient's absorbed me a great deal but they suffer from two basic defects one I have rather little to do with the savages on the spot do not observe them enough and two I do not speak their language this second effect will be hard enough to overcome with these two clear ambitions in view having more to do with the people he was studying and learning their language malinovski decided to make a fresh start with a different culture on a short voyage around the coast he had been intrigued by the people of a rather remote group of islands called the Trobriand off the eastern tip of New Guinea in 1915 he made his base in the most important village on the largest of these islands in this village called Americana which has no signpost and which is well off the beaten tourist track malinovski x' career as a modern field worker began and with it was to come a new energy and momentum for anthropology it was here just under those palm trees that he pitched his tent and it was from here that he began to describe and understand what mattered most to the people whose lives he decided to share soon after i established myself in americana i began to take part in a way in the village life to look forward to the important or festive events to take personal interest in the developments of the small village occurrences to wake up every morning to a day presenting itself to me more or less as it does to the native i would get out from under my mosquito net to find around me the village life beginning to stir for the people well advanced in their working day according to the house and also to the season before they get up and begin their labors early or late as work dresses as I went on my morning walk through the village I could see intimate details of family life of toilet cooking taking up meals I could see the arrangements for the day's work people starting on the evidence or groups of men and women busy yet some manufacturing tasks quarrels jokes family scenes events usually trivial sometimes dramatic but always significant form the atmosphere of my daily life as well as of theirs in the ordinary course of this tribal life the children who always play in the evening band together to amuse themselves in the central place of the village mana norske obviously enjoyed the company of the children who followed him round the villages and he must have fascinated them one of those children was Bob Wow who still remembers Malinowski's impact on the village mr. Garland I mean our web why how you talk on the toe in this inquiry team turn lamb and [Music] the Quakers will L go [Music] malinovski was looking at Trobriand life to find clues about how all societies worked his observations led him to the conclusion that all aspects of social life were actually designed to serve basic human needs such things as food shelter and reproduction serving those needs was the function of every social act an institution and this way of looking at things became known as functionalism the functional method recognizes perhaps above all that the satisfaction of biological needs implies and develops a system of derivative requirements man living under conditions of culture obtains his bread indirectly through cooperation and exchange he has to procure it and complicated economic pursuits culture therefore creates new requirements for implements weapons and means of transport for social cooperation for institutions which ensure an ordinary and lawful working of human groups and which allow of organized cooperation Malinowski was not so interested in how things had evolved a problem that had obsessed so many of his predecessors he believed that what was important was to look at how society actually worked at the time it was being observed by the anthropologist take marriage for example the older anthropology was focusing on what was the origin of marriage what was the evolutionary relationship between marriage by capture and marriage by purchase married by exchange he was the such the thing is group marriage was such a thing as primitive communism in women you see and Malinowski said in essence don't talk nonsense I mean about this let us focus on what is here and now let us explore the biological aspects of marriage the legal aspects the economic aspects the aspects of relation of social groups and kinship the symbolic aspects and so he all the time this was a plea for further and further exploration any aspect of social life could be approached using the key question what does it actually do in society for example malinovski found one particular thing permeated most parts of trobriand life magic magic the very word seems to reveal a world of mysterious and unexpected possibilities partly because we hope to find in it the quintessence of primitive man's longings and of his wisdom and that whatever it might be is worth knowing partly because magic seems to stir up in everyone some hidden mental forces some lingering hops in the miraculous some dormant beliefs in man's mysterious possibilities the fact that the Trobriand has resorted to magic intrigued malinovski mainly because the events which provoked magical behavior were those in which they were really expert there were magical rites for each stage of the gardening year magic for fishing there was even love magic there was a magical accompaniment for almost everything but malinovski wondered why they needed magic spells and rites to accompany technical procedures at which they were so expert for example the Trobriand errs were and still are proficient gardeners their livelihood depends on the yam crop and individual status also comes into play with the distribution and display of food at harvest time in fact there's a lot at stake in the gardening year magic is seen as necessary for the favorable outcome of the garden crops and to exert a control on the weather magic is so much a frame of mind for the Islanders that even an economics graduate like Jerome who will one day be paramount chief of the tribunes thinks of magic in a way that malinovski would recognize magic it's like your fertilizer so off it Eliza is magic to make whole crops grow and you don't see any conflict in learning spells and about herbs it doesn't conflict with your idea of science at all science is founded on the conviction that experience effort and reason are valid magic on the belief that hope cannot fail nor desire deceive the theories of knowledge are dictated by logic those are magic by the Association of ideas under the influence of desire [Music] malinovski was now tackling field work in a more sophisticated way than even he realized at the time everyday as he wrote up his notes he began to paint a picture of native life that was very different from that portrayed by his predecessors it was more complete how did he manage this just what was it about his own approach that made his work so much better than that done by previous anthropologists people like rivers for example well for a start he spent a long time in one place he was out here in the Trobriand for just under two years and for most of that time he was in close contact with the natives but the real breakthrough though came because he communicated with these people in their own land which he was a very able linguist and there's no doubt that he spoke kiriwina in the local language with great fluency boy we sure don't want me see what sighing a booger no loss they were a cow already on anybody boom nuke available you in his letters malinovski noted with amusement how the Islanders reacted to his anthropological pursuits he wrote to his fiancee Elsie messin by the way I was known before as an asana Americana the man from Americana now I hear myself announced by the term Tolly la ba gua the man of the old talk ought to put it nicely the master of the myth there is of course no reverence associated with this designation indeed it implies rather something like that who is Dottie and on the point of old man's talk this style of fieldwork speaking the language fluently living with the community keeping detailed daily notebooks came to be called participant observation it was tough and demanding work and it was also intensely lonely we know this from the letters that malinovski wrote and from the personal diaries that he kept when he was out here in the Trobriand i well remember the long visits I paid to the villages during the first weeks the feeling of hopelessness and despair after many obstinate but futile attempts had entirely failed to bring me into real touch with the natives or supply me with any material I had periods of despondency and I buried myself in the reading of novels as a man might take a drink in a fit of tropical depression and boredom these Diaries make fascinating reading they tell of the rigors of fieldwork of the doubts the achievements the failures and the irritations but they also show that he took time off to relax with a rather interesting group of expatriates who lived out here at the time among them the pearl trader the doctor and local magistrate and the merchant it's clear from the Diaries that his friends provided more than just a social refuge for they too had important insights into the workings of trobriand life ironically it was the missionary to these islands not Malinowski's favorite species of colonial who had recorded an important ceremonial activity that was at the source of malinovski fame as an anthropologist the Trobriand is call it the cooler early in 1915 in the village of de Caius I heard conch shells blowing there was a general commotion in the village and I saw the presentation of a large necklace I of course inquired about the meaning of the custom and was told that it is one of the exchanges of presence made when visiting friends at that time I had no inkling that I had been a witness of a detailed manifestation what I subsequently found out was Kula matanov ski soon realized that this exchange called Kula involved no ordinary presence and was between rather special friends so much of what you can observe of native life seems boring and dull just because you don't initially know what on earth is going on and to begin with malinovski was in the same position impressionistic aliy it makes you feel that joy is an enormous fare or garden party this letter is even for me a better comparison because a typically English garden party seems to me always entirely pointless and inherently tedious quite as much as the cooler I can understand from the outside why people indulge in one but subjectively I could find happiness and joy in night it didn't take him long however to realize that the cooler was at the centre of trobriand life cooler means to go and reflect the fact that these exchange ceremonies were the final act in a vast tribal enterprise which involved elaborate and dangerous expeditions [Music] [Music] [Music] each cooler expedition is launched with the aim of returning back with a particular set of valuables either armed shells called wily like this which has just come back from Catawba or necklaces like this called soo lava to us as Outsiders they're just rather strange pieces of native jewelry but for the Trobriand as it's more than their appearance that matters for these people these objects are venerated they each have a personal history and a name and renown of their own these valuables can't be bought or sold they have a worth that isn't estimable in simple monetary terms they are in fact rather special items of exchange and they're at a center of a ritual that involves a whole ring of islands out here in the western Pacific of which the Trobriand are just a part the Kula is carried on by communities inhabiting a wide ring of islands which form a closed circuit along this route articles of two kinds and these two kinds only are constantly traveling in opposite directions in the direction of the hands of a clock moves constantly long necklaces of red shell called su lava in the opposite direction move bracelets of white shell called moi Lee each of these articles as it travels in its own direction on the closed circuit meets on its way articles of the other class and is constantly being exchanged for them every movement of the Kula articles every detail of the transactions is fixed and regulated by a set of traditional rules and conventions the cooler is still at the center of trobriand life and requires months of preparation it all starts with the building of a special cooler canoe no Walker a pillow a lot more a pillar that way you're not gonna talk all of the tiger to bully you know machine washed off I develop telepathy Optus a boondoggle opera tiger grabbed this collar la cañada booyah we go baboon ella and Mohabbatein et we open our a multiple award Holly welcome to Nevada Lamia Dharamsala versus i'ma water verrucas opener a goofy cow when a boom wanna be a war developer expeditions leave today just as they did when malinovski stayed on these islands there's a special magic for each stage of Akula here it's performed to forestall any disasters that might happen on the journey the rites go on today exactly as they did when malinovski recorded them [Music] the aim of each cooler expedition is to return with one or more of the venerated objects and the focus of each trip is the handing over of the actual necklace or arm shell each Voyager is heading for the village of his Kula partner where he will wait around as a rather special guest until he is reluctantly given the object of his anticipation he will hide any sign of excitement or gratitude as he will one day have to reciprocate with a valuable of equivalent worth when his partner calls on him it just like rather like a game of chess or some such game your object as a player is to possess if only for a short time one of these named highly valuable objects which are either necklaces which are going around that way or are Michelle's words are going around that way and there are still even today some named armed shells and necklaces which melon offski actually mentions in his book which are still circulating the cooler also provides an opportunity for trade in other objects mostly the sorts of things you can't get at home it's a time for keeping up old friendships and maintaining contact with neighbors who very often have different languages and cultures it's an enterprise in which the whole community have taken part and the folk back home eagerly await evidence of the expedition success what was the bargaining like how many armed shells or necklaces are there are there any famous ones all the trophies are carried triumphantly from the shore across the island in this case to the Chiefs village a famous named object that has been circulating since mythological time arouses a strong desire for possession but what you do with these priceless objects once you've seduced one from your appointed partner most people have to offer them to their Chiefs famous necklace I'm sure and I will have to way back if I kept it it means I'm challenging him famous objects usually goes to topic Chiefs history if I kept it that means I'm challenging me what's that necklace for the arm she is very famous and it should belong to me what if you held on to it why value would poison is that through magic or by direct poison magic is still a fundamental part of trobriand life and the chief is expected to be a leading exponent the paramount chief today is why body a conspicuously successful magician he is held responsible for any fortune or misfortune that befores his people with this responsibility goes the honor of receiving the best spoils of any cooler expedition that he sponsors I look at the Pokemon if you thought you bar belabor cynically lobelia gasp growl beside each enemy shower curtain you gotta turn up philatelist does it normally program is to oversee [Music] some of those ancestors were actually recorded by mamonov ski singing their traditional songs the recordings he made using wax cylinders have recently come to light they're a fascinating glimpse into the past when we played them to Bob Wow he could name the original singer and still sing the song [Music] [Music] [Music] my god working on me [Music] one of the things that really interested malinovski about the tro ground i'm this were there myths the stories that they told to explain how things were in olden times it said that the ancestors of all the Trobriand is used to live beneath the ground it's also said that the original ancestors of each of the tribes and clans came up to colonize the Trobriand islands through that cave [Applause] the oldest myths describe events which took place just at the moment when the earth began to be people from underneath humanity existed somewhere underground since people emerge from there on the surface in full decoration equipped with magic belonging to social divisions and obeying definite laws and customs but beyond this we know nothing about what they did underground oh this is fantastic lot of evidence of human ancestors up here but apart from a few bats I can't see any of the original totemic animals nor any evidence of the people originally came up from under here to populate the surface however the current paramount chief white body claims he can trace back his ancestors something like 75 generations right back to the original people from the underworld who came up to live on earth [Music] while recording life and death and the tribunes malinovski suffered his own loss his mother to whom he'd always been close died is no more my life pierced with grief of my happiness destroyed all the time I feel grief and desperate sadness such as I felt as a child when I was separated from mother for a few days I resisted with the help of shallow formulas I closed my eyes but the tears flow constantly the feeling of the evil of existence I think constantly about the shallow optimism of religious beliefs I'd give anything to believe in the immortality of the soul the terrible mystery that surrounds the death of someone dear close to you this is one of the more remote and traditional villages these people are in mourning recently one of their close relatives has died morning out here is not just an interstate there a certain output signs to express just exactly which members of the family are in mourning they shave their heads they cover their body in ashes they wear dark clothing and wear the beads of mourning it said that when someone dies their Bellomo or spirit goes to a place called tumor it's an island off the northwest coast it's obviously a Trobriand heaven life is very much the same as it was on earth but people are much happier they carry on their gardening their fishing they're singing and they're dancing and of course all the associated magic and needless to say life is one endless round of cool expeditions the world of ancestors is never far from Trobriand thought people here feel they have a real contact with their dead friends and relatives to become an ancestor you don't of course have to have lived that long this song tells of a young lover who has died and gone to tumour [Music] [Music] malinovski was like a breath of fresh air on all the subjects that anthropology tackled in his day topics like exchange myth ancestor worship religion and the family he swept away old theories and filled the gaps with a startling amount of well ordered information but there was one topic that he tackled in a particularly interesting way the sexual habits of the Islanders he didn't just report that the girls were more beautiful and that they wore fewer clothes or that the men were unusually promiscuous like most Westerners he was intrigued by these topics but he was beginning to know Trobriand life well enough to realize that sex like all topics had to be viewed in a much wider context malinovski had more than just a passing interest in sexual matters for most of his life he had a reputation as a womanizer but when he came to considering sex among the Trobriand as he saw it in a much wider context than just the different habits and customs that surround sexual intercourse itself for him the anthropologist the whole topic of sex included the various social consequences that arise from the physical and emotional attraction that men and women have for each other malinovski x' work on kinship marriage courtship and sex went more deeply into these aspects of native life in the work of any previous anthropologist in this matrilineal society sex relations appear between unmarried people appear to be very easy therefore this implied that sections in our society automobile ought to be very easy there's a lot of non sequiturs and in the argument but certainly he came to be seen as a crusader for well what later came to be known as the permissive society very liberal loose living a very libertarian view of sex relation [Music] II wrote a book with the lovely title Argonauts of the western Pacific now the very title you know I mean it glamour is sort of written into the in title third one was battled with the Freudians and had sex and repression in the savages Agia then he really capitalized on it with a book called sexual life of savages in Northwest no news early now this was playing the gay you know he was meaning to be attract publicity sexual love savages is not terribly not pornographic really but it may be a pornographic in those days certainly in this university it got on the banned books right away like it or not the topics that malinovski wrote about caused quite a stir basically he relished the attention the customs and even the sexual habits of the Trobriand errs were now the subject of drawing-room conversation he believed very much in putting anthropology on the map he saw himself very much as somebody who who wanted to make this new sass known and accepted and he for instance he broadcast on the BBC on such subjects as marriage he had a debate of several programs on marriage with Robert brief oh he talked on religion he made people aware of anthropology in a way which was not up till then usual I think some anthropologists disapproved of this strongly they thought it was a vulgar ization but that was certainly not his motive malinovski had married Elsie masam the fiancee of his Trobriand years and they had three daughters and formed a close family basically he was a very moral man he believed very firmly in the good old-fashioned values friendship loyalty truth at the sort of put it all on the table level and he expected loyalty and he gave loyalty in that sense he was a man of quite definite moral convictions but much more than that as you know he wrote towards the end of his life quite a bit about freedom and what freedom and civilization published after he was dead does I think convey very much Mellon oski zoned rendering office malinovski welcomed his students to his house in the Italian Tyrol where theory and methods were always topics for discussion when his wife died in 1935 he went on a field trip to Africa to visit some of his students they were in the process of doing field work in several different locations by closely following his methods through these students he exerted a strong influence on the emerging field of African Studies he also found time to do some anthropological survey work himself among several African tribes it was during this period of extensive travel that he developed an enthusiasm for a better understanding of people's directly under colonialism he was a very strong critic of anything that could be regarded as colonial exploitation he pointed out quite firmly in 1938 how the Europeans had taken so much from the Africans and given very little in return how there was an asymmetry of relationship in everything from church to home to political affairs and so on the Europeans were in the superior position in the African very inferior position he had in his seminars people like Kenyatta were after who became president of Kenya Allison Davis one of the most distinguished American black anthropologists and others as well Ralph Bunche who was in United Nations later was in his seminar and these people I think respected him and he respected them and and that level I think was always willing to challenge any colonialist ideas Malinowski had become an exciting and controversial figure and his company was sought in fashionable circles a major source of his reputation where the seminars he gave at the London School of Economics I was teaching about administration in Africa and somebody said to me you can't possibly teach anything about Africa unless you attend Malinowski seminar so I duly did sir and then I became you might say looked on anthropology it was a extraordinary like no other seminar I've ever attended anywhere people were nominally entitled to give asked to give papers of seminar if they got me on ten minutes this would they'll be doing very well indeed Malinowski would then interrupt and you would be charging off on some completely different hair it seemed at the time very strange it seemed as if you never knew of direction it would go in oh why but as I have been looking back and thinking over it of course it was much more structured than man imagined it was directed towards and well getting us to answer questions in a manner that showed we understood his theory which he mustered some time of course evans-pritchard all did guess what I'm going to say next in 1984 students of those famous seminars gathered at the London School of Economics to commemorate the centenary of malinovski birth and there are simple here this afternoon then this is a very significant and even a touching occasion Malnati's fieldwork has been generally regarded as providing a prototype for modern anthropological field research and I think this is correct though not in the way often imagined it has been argued by Blackman by Evans Pajar Diamond Legion that malinovski is essential achievement in field work the source of his strength and originality is one of them put it was live for long but it wasn't only his students who adopted his field work methods today there are anthropologists working all over the world who conduct their field research along the lines that malinovski laid down living for long periods with remote people's learning and speaking their language sharing their lives and appreciating their values in 1923 when malinovski was offered a permanent post here at the London School of Economics he chose the title he was to be reader in social anthropology that distinguished it from the much broader discipline of cultural anthropology already being taught to a second generation of Americans by Franz boas and his students by the end of his life malinovski himself had influenced a group of remarkable students they carried on this emphasis on the study of the social aspects of in life and that has become the focus of British anthropology today Branislav malinovski died suddenly of a heart attack in 1942 he was 58 he had just accepted a post as professor at Yale and it also started to do more field work this time in Mexico in England his influence had been crucial to the modernization of anthropology 20 years earlier it was his vision of a goal which suggested that anthropology was about to enter a new phase the final goal of which an anthropologist should never lose sight is to grasp the natives point of view his relation to life to realize his vision of his world [Music] [Music] you