Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronisław Malinowski (1884–1942) was a Polish-born anthropologist, educated in Kraków and Leipzig before coming to the London School of Economics in 1910. Caught in Australia by the outbreak of the First World War as an enemy alien, he spent most of the next four years in the Trobriand Islands of New Guinea, living in a tent among the people he studied and learning their language. Argonauts of the Western Pacific, published in 1922, established participant observation as the method of modern anthropology. He taught at the LSE for two decades and at Yale in his last years, and his students shaped British social anthropology.