Malinowski's Kiriwina

Description

A note on orthography -- "Trobriand Islands" by Bronislaw Malinowski -- Samarai, "gate to the field" -- Picturing the ethnographer -- Touluwa, chief of Omarakana -- Coral gardens and their harvests -- Dancing at Milamala -- "Physical types" and "personalities" -- "Magic" -- Fishing and canoes of the lagoon -- "Village scenes" -- Women's domain -- "The children's republic" -- Mortuary rites and exchanges -- Masawa canoes and the kula quest -- "Black and white" -- Appendix 1 : Malinowski’s photographic equipment -- Appendix 2 : the numbering of the collection.

First Sentence

In July 1888 the British flag was raised over Samarai, a coral islet in the China Strait at the eastern end of New Guinea.

Description

Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands in eastern Papua New Guinea, is anthropology's "sacred place." It was here that Bronislaw Malinowski conducted the path-breaking fieldwork that enabled him to revolutionize British social anthropology. And it was here that he developed one of anthropology's most important tools: photography. Malinowski's Kiriwina presents nearly two hundred of Malinowski's previously unpublished photographs of the Islanders among whom he lived between 1915 and 1918. The images are more than embellishments of his ethnography; they are a recreation in striking detail of a distant world. Michael Young, an anthropologist and Malinowski's authorized biographer, has selected the photographs based on one of Malinowski's unpublished studies of the region, and the plan of that abandoned project has helped structure this book.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Malinowski's Kiriwina: fieldwork photography, 1915-1918University of Chicago Press1998-01-01
• Malinowski's KiriwinaHardcoverUniversity Of Chicago Press1999-02-15