Bronisław Malinowski

“The time when we could tolerate accounts presenting us the native as a distorted, childish caricature of a human being are gone. This picture is false, and like many other falsehoods, it has been killed by Science.”

—Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942)

“Ethnology or Anthropology, the science of Man, must not shun him in his innermost self, in his instinctive and emotional life.”

—Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942)

“There are no peoples however primitive without religion and magic. Nor are there, it must be added, any savage races lacking in either the scientific attitude, or in science, though this lack has been frequently attributed to them.”

—Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942)

“There is no doubt that the destiny of indigenous races has been tragic in the process of contact with European invasion… The historian of the future will have to register that Europeans in the past sometimes exterminated whole island peoples; that they expropriated most of the patrimony of savage races; that they introduced slavery in a specially cruel and pernicious form; and that even if they abolished it later, they treated the expatriated Negroes as outcasts and pariahs.”

—Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942)

"The final goal ... is to grasp the native's point of view,
his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world."

—Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942)

"Coastal sailing as long as it is perfectly safe and easy commands no magic. Overseas expeditions are invariably bound up with ceremonies and ritual. Man resorts to magic only where chance and circumstances are not fully controlled by knowledge."

—Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942)