“Ethnology Has Introduced Law and Order”: Remarks on the Works of Bronisław Malinowski as a “Hybrid Activity”

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to look at the work of the eminent ethnologist Bronisław Malinowski as an artistic creation. His work could be of interest to visual arts researchers. In this essay, his work is treat ed as a collection of images with a strictly European provenance. Examples of such images could be depictions of the places where the Polish ethnologist conducted his research. These depictions are, in fact, maps which he created by means of words. The images are like painted descriptions of tropical nature or, as Malinowski himself said, cinematic representations of the everyday life of the natives from the Trobriand Islands; they are people’s portraits created by verbal descriptions, numerous photographs and also specifi cally “modernist” visual forms, such as tables, graphs, diagrams etc. The European nature of these images confi rms the hypothesis that the phenomenon described, rather infelicitously, as primitivism, of which ethnology represented by the second generation of fi eld-working ethnologists, to which Malinowski belonged, was a component, is a construct created by a strictly European imagination.