Quotes from Bronis?aw 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.

Again, they have no idea of what could be called the evolution of the world or the evolution of society; that is, they do not look back towards a series of successive changes, which happened in nature or in humanity, as we do. We, in our religious and scientific outlook alike, know that earth ages and that humanity ages, and we think of both in these terms; for them, both are eternally the same, eternally youthful.

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

Magic enables man to carry out with confidence his important tasks, to maintain his poise and his mental integrity in fits of anger, in the throes of hate, of unrequited love, of despair and anxiety. The function of magic is to ritualize man's optimism, to enhance his faith in the victory of hope over fear. Magic expresses the greater value for man of confidence over doubt, of steadfastness over vacillation, of optimism over pessimism.

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.

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.

So acts every 'man-in-the-street' in our own society, so has acted the average member of any society through the past ages, and so acts the present-day savage; and the lower his level of cultural development, the greater stickler he will be for good manners, propriety and form, and the more incomprehensive and odious to him will be the non-conforming point of view.

It is therefore not going beyond what is fully granted by facts, to maintain that a general loss of interest in life, of the joie de vivre, the cutting of all the bonds of intense interest, which bind members of a human community to existence, will result in their giving up the desire to live altogether, and that therefore they will fall an easy prey to any disease, as well as fail to multiply.

Zanadto wlaz?em w towarzystwo, które tu kwitnie. Ci?gle zadaj? si? z Francuzk? i drem franc[uskim] (?ydkiem) z pierwszej oraz z ma?p? australsk?, wobec której wypuszczam zreszt? du?o snobizmu naukowego.

Czarne ma?py udaj?ce Europejczyków w tramie daj? mi poczucie wy?szo?ci rasy bia?ej.

The final goal of which an ethnographer should never lose sight…is, briefly, to grasp the native's point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world