Bronisław Malinowski

Born in Kraków in 1884, Malinowski took his doctorate at Jagiellonian University in 1908, then moved to the London School of Economics to work on Aboriginal economics through documents. In 1914 he travelled to Australia and spent years in the Trobriand Islands and across Melanesia, living inside the cultures he studied. Returning after World War I, he published Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922 - the Kula ring study that made him one of Europe's foremost anthropologists. He built British social anthropology from his LSE chair, championing psychological functionalism against Radcliffe-Brown's structural approach. When World War II began he was guest-lecturing in America; he stayed, joined Yale, and died there in 1942. His Melanesian diary, published by his widow in 1967, became controversial for its raw ethnocentrism.