Blackwell Reference Online

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Bronislaw K. Malinowski and Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown are generally regarded as the “founding fathers” of British social anthropology. Born in Cracow, then part of the Austrian province of Galicia, Malinowski studied natural sciences, mathematics, and later psychology and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University where his father had been an eminent professor of Slavonic philology and folklore. In his formative years the main intellectual influence on Malinowski, apart from his father's linguistic and ethnographic interests, appears to have been a combination of the philosophical current of “second positivism” – in his doctoral dissertation Malinowski analyzed the idea of “the economy of thought” in the epistemological works of Mach and Avenarius – and the neo-romantic movement of Polish cultural modernism (Ellen et al. 1990; Young 2004 : 3–127). After graduating in 1908, Malinowski went to Leipzig, where he studied with Wundt, the founder of the so-called Völkerpsychologie , and with the economic historian Bücher. In 1910 he moved to England, enrolled at the London School of Economics (LSE), and immersed himself in anthropology. Apart from his teachers at LSE (Seligman and Westermarck), Malinowski developed his ideas in critical response to and through ecletic use of the works of Frazer, Rivers, Durkheim, and Freud, among others. During World War I, despite being an enemy alien ... log in or subscribe to read full text