Bronislaw Malinowski - Myth in Primitive Psychology

BY

BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI

Ph.D., D.Sc.

Reader in Social Anthropology in the
University of London

Author of
The Father in Primitive Psychology

1926

Copyright 2011 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library

Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski was born in Krakw, Austria-Hungary (in present day Poland) in 1884. Both his parents were academics, and as a child he excelled academically. Malinowski received his Ph.D. in philosophy, physics, and mathematics in 1908 from the Jagiellonian University in Krakw He graduated sub auspicious Imperatoris, the highest honour in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Malinowski spent the next two years at Leipzig University, where he was influenced by Wilhelm Wundt, and his theories of folk psychology. He had become acquainted with Sir James Frazers The Golden Bough, which stimulated his interest in primitive people and a desire to pursue anthropology. At the time, Frazer and other British authors were amongst the best-known anthropologists, and so in 1910 Malinowski travelled to England to study at the London School of Economics.

In 1914, Malinowski travelled to Papua (later Papua New Guinea) where he conducted fieldwork at Mailu and then, more famously, in the Trobriand Islands. He made several field trips to this area, some of which were extended to avoid the difficulties of emigrating from an Australian colony during the First World War. It was during this period that he conducted his fieldwork on Kula.

By 1922, Malinowski had earned a doctorate of science in anthropology and was teaching at the London School of Economics (LSE). In that year his most famous work, Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), was published. Universally regarded as a masterpiece, the book saw Malinowski became one of the best known anthropologists in the world. For the next three decades Malinowski established the LSE as one of Britains greatest centres of anthropology. He trained many students, including those from Britains colonies who went on to become important figures in their home countries.

Malinowski taught intermittently in the United States, and was a lecturer at Cornell University in 1933 and for several years after that. When World War II broke out during one of these trips he remained in the country, taking up a position at Yale University, although he remained actively identified with the Polish partisan cause during the war.

His career at Yale was less spectacular than previously, but it gave him the chance to study peasant markets in Mexico in 1940 and 1941. Bronislaw Malinowski died in 1942, aged 58. Aside from his Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), his best-remembered works are Myth in Primitive Psychology (1926), Crime and Custom in Savage Society (1926), Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927) and The Sexual life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia (1929).

If I had the power of evoking the past, I should like to lead you back some twenty years to an old Slavonic university townI mean the town of Cracow, the ancient capital of Poland and the seat of the oldest university in eastern Europe. I could then show you a student leaving the medival college buildings, obviously in some distress of mind, hugging, however, under his arm, as the only solace of his troubles, three green volumes with the well-known golden imprint, a beautiful conventionalized design of mistletoethe symbol of The Golden Bough.

I had just then been ordered to abandon for a time my physical and chemical research because of ill-health, but I was allowed to follow up a favourite side-line of study, and I decided to make my first attempt to read an English masterpiece in the original. Perhaps my mental distress would have been lessened, had I been allowed to look into the future and to foresee the present occasion, on which I have the great privilege of delivering an address in honour of Sir James Frazer to a distinguished audience, in the language of The Golden Bough itself.

For no sooner had I begun to read this great work, than I became immersed in it and enslaved by it. I realized then that anthropology, as presented by Sir James Frazer, is a great science, worthy of as much devotion as any of her elder and more exact sister-studies, and I became bound to the service of Frazerian anthropology.

We are gathered here to celebrate the annual totemic festival of The Golden Bough; to revive and strengthen the bonds of anthropological union; to commune with the source and symbol of our anthropological interest and affection. I am but your humble spokesman, in expressing our joint admiration to the great writer and his classical works; The Golden Bough, Totemism and Exogamy, Folklore in the Old Testament, Psyches Task, and The Belief in Immortality. As a true officiating magician in a savage tribe would have to do, I have to recite the whole list, so that the spirit of the works (their mana) may dwell among us.

In all this, my task is pleasant and in a way easy, for implicit in whatever I may say is a tribute to him, whom I have always regarded as the Master. On the other hand this very circumstance also makes my task difficult, for having received so much, I fear I may not have enough to show in return. I have therefore decided to keep my peace even while I am addressing youto let another one speak through my mouth, another one who has been to Sir James Frazer an inspiration and a lifelong friend, as Sir James has been to us. This other one, I need hardly tell you, is the modern representative of primitive man, the contemporary savage, whose thoughts, whose feelings, whose very life-breath pervades all that Frazer has written.

In other words, I shall not try to serve up any theories of my own, but instead I shall lay before you some results of my anthropological field-work, carried out in northwest Melanesia. I shall restrict myself, moreover, to a subject upon which Sir James Frazer has not directly concentrated his attention, but in which, as I shall try to show you, his influence is as fruitful as in those many subjects that he has made his own.

[The above formed the opening passages of an address delivered in honour of Sir James Frazer at the University of Liverpool, in November, 1925.]

By the examination of a typical Melanesian culture and by a survey of the opinions, traditions, and behaviour of these natives, I propose to show how deeply the sacred tradition, the myth, enters into their pursuits, and how strongly it controls their moral and social behaviour. In other words, the thesis of the present work is that an intimate connection exists between the word, the mythos, the sacred tales of a tribe, on the one hand, and their ritual acts, their moral deeds, their social organization, and even their practical activities, on the other.

In order to gain a background for our description of the Melanesian facts, I shall briefly summarize the present state of the science of mythology. Even a superficial survey of the literature would reveal that there is no monotony to complain of as regards the variety of opinions or the acrimony of polemics. To take only the recent up-to-date theories advanced in explanation of the nature of myth, legend, and fairy-tale, we should have to head the list, at least as regards output and self-assertion, by the so-called school of Nature-mythology which flourishes mainly in Germany. The writers of this school maintain that primitive man is highly interested in natural phenomena, and that his interest is predominantly of a theoretical, contemplative, and poetical character. In trying to express and interpret the phases of the moon, or the regular and yet changing path of the sun across the skies, primitive man constructs symbolic personified rhapsodies. To writers of this school every myth possesses as its kernel or ultimate reality some natural phenomenon or other, elaborately woven into a tale to an extent which sometimes almost masks and obliterates it. There is not much agreement among these students as to what type of natural phenomenon lies at the bottom of most mythological productions. There are extreme lunar mythologists so completely moonstruck with their idea that they will not admit that any other phenomenon could lend itself to a savage rhapsodic interpretation except that of earths nocturnal satellite. The Society for the Comparative Study of Myth, founded in Berlin in 1906, and counting among its supporters such famous scholars as Ehrenreich, Siecke, Winckler, and many others, carried on their business under the sign of the moon. Others, like Frobenius for instance, regard the sun as the only subject around which primitive man has spun his symbolic tales. Then there is the school of meteorological interpreters who regard wind, weather, and colours of the skies as the essence of myth. To this belonged such well-known writers of the older generation as Max Mller and Kuhn. Some of these departmental mythologists fight fiercely for their heavenly body or principle; others have a more catholic taste, and prepare to agree that primeval man has made his mythological brew from all the heavenly bodies taken together.