Malinowski Revisited

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Further Reflections on Lesu and Malinowski's DiaryAuthor(s): Hortense PowdermakerSource: Oceania, Vol. 40, No. 4, Fortieth Anniversary Number (Jun., 1970), pp. 344-347Published by: on behalf ofWiley Oceania Publications, University of SydneyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40329890Accessed: 09-03-2016 23:56 UTC

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FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON LESU AND MALINOWSKI'S DIARY

By Hortense Powdermaker

T ESU was the site of my first field work and, therefore, has a special significance.

-*^ I assume that the firsts in most areas of living influence attitudes and

behaviour in recurring similar events. I was, indeed, fortunate that this first field

experience was in a functioning primitive society in Melanesia. It provided,

I think, a considerable part of the basis for whatever success I had in later expeditions.

These were all in modern or near-modern societies such as Mississippi, Hollywood,

a mining township in Zambia and, currently, youth culture on the Berkeley campus.

Certain attitudes and patterns of behaviour set in Lesu influenced me in quite different

field situations.1

The relative detachment from my own culture which followed the initial plunge

into a late stone-age society stayed with me. However, I did not experience the

usual culture shock supposed to occur in such experiences, but I somehow accepted

the Melanesian society asa given , to explore. My culture shock occurred when

I returned home and found American customs, which I had taken for granted, rather

strange. I looked at them as if I were a Melanesian anthropologist. Having studied

Lesu mortuary rites in great detail and written a paper on them, when I later went to

a funeral for a member of my own family I saw it as an American mortuary rite in

spite of my emotional involvement. As I have written elsewhere,2 it is my impression

that the experience of culture shock after the anthropologist comes home is not

uncommon. The attitude of being something of an outsider in my own society

(even though involved in it) never left me. Many other anthropologists share this

attitude with me, but it was particularly significant for me because, unlike them, I

was bent on studying my own society. The quality of detachment carried me through

the uneasy bi-racial situation in Mississippi, where I was identified with both Blacks

and Whites, mutually hostile to, and fearful of, each other. I doubt if I could have

made that study if I had not gone first to Lesu ; Mississippi prepared me, in turn,

for the bi-racial African mining township.

Then, too, the not-taking-anything-for-granted attitude in Lesu stood by me

in other situations where I could have taken considerable for granted. New Ireland

and the Bismarck Archipelago, of which it is a part, had not been studied by any

social anthropologist before I went there. The studies of German missionaries

before World War I on parts of the archipelago were not of much help to me.

1 A detailed description and critical evaluation of how I worked and lived in Lesu (and on

later field expeditions) has been published in Stranger and Friend, The Way of an Anthropologist,

New York, 1966 ; paperback, 1967.

« Hortense Fowdermaker, Field Work , International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,

Vol. V, New York, 1968.


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FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON LESU AND MALINOWSKFS DIARY 345

Codrington's survey of the Solomons and the New Hebrides, Haddon's reports of the

Cambridge expedition to the Torres Straits, and Seligman's survey of Melanesians

in British New Guinea gave me only some general Melanesian patterns.3 Malinowski's

Argonauts of the Western Pacific had been published and provided a model for a

detailed analytical functional study.4 But none gave me enough to take much for

granted about life in Lesu. There, I had to dig out for myself data on the kinship

system, the economic structure, the magical rites, the elaborate ritual carvings, child

rearing customs, and so on. This was hard and time-consuming, as compared to

other expeditions where I could proceed from previous studies in the same area.

But the not-taking-anything-for-granted was a valuable attitude which remained

with me in later field work, when I could and did learn considerable from earlier

studies. After reading African urban studies, I could have expected widespread

anomie on the Copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). But I looked for

myself and found relatively little anomie. My strong hunch is that too often social

scientists document patterns already described and do not look for something different

and, therefore, never find it. There has been a healthy trend in the opposite direction

in American anthropology. A number of scholars have critically examined in the

field both the data and interpretations of earlier studies. Among the examples

are Oscar Lewis' re-study of Tepoztlan and Helen Codere's on the Kwakiutl potlatch.5

Lesu was, likewise, my first experience in getting ethnographic data from people

instead of books. As a student my days were spent in the British Museum, reading

and then reading some more. Learning from people was far more exciting and

rewarding than the passive book-learning. Following small clues from interviews

and casual conversations and from observation of ritual and social life was like a

detective story. Always I was balancing this bit of evidence against that, trying to

generalize about a possible pattern. The habit of the constant observer, no matter

how seemingly casual the situation, likewise remained with me. In Mississippi

having a coke in a drug store, on the Copperbelt a visit to the European-owned

grocery store, in Hollywood a dinner party - all provided clues.

The holistic frame in which I had been trained by Malinowski came alive in Lesu

and I was never to lose it. Although I went to Mississippi to study the Negroes,

I soon found that I had also to study the whites in the community and the inter-

actions between the two groups. I went to Africa to study social change among

the Africans, and there, too, I learned that I had to study the same phenomenon

among the Europeans in the community. Most of the Africanists - even those

8 Robert Henry Codrington, The Melanesians : Studies in Their Anthropology and Folklore,

Oxford University Press, 1891 ; Alfred Cort Haddon, Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological

Expedition to Torres Straits, 6 vols., Cambridge University Press, 1901-1935 ; Charles Gabriel

Seligman, The Melanesians of British New Guinea, Cambridge University Press, 1910.

4 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific : An Account of Native Enterprise

and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, London, 1922.

8 Oscar Lewis, Life in a Mexican Village : Tepoztlan Restudied, University of Illinois, 195 1 ;

Helen Codere, The Amiable Side of Kwakiutl Life : The Potlatch and the Play-potlatch ,

American Anthropologist, Vol. 58, No. 2, 1956.




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346 FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON LESU AND MALINOWSKFS DIARY

interested in social change - tended to pay little or no attention to the Europeans

though they were, obviously, a source of much of the change.

Sensitivity to clues about the Melanesian social system and people extended to

their reactions to me. I was scared of making a faux pas when I began working in

Lesu. Fortunately, in my first field work there was no bi-racial situation with its

taboos. I knew the major Melanesian taboos, but not the details of etiquette in

Lesu, where proper etiquette was far more important than in my own society. I

learned to trust my own intuitions about what to do and what not to do and to

watch for small hints. A natural sensitivity was thus strengthened and helped

me function in later field experiences. For example, in both Mississippi and in

Africa, I had to be constantly sensitive about how far I could go in breaking the

white man's taboos without endangering my project. Its success, being able to stay

in the field as long as I desired and to leave it so that another anthropologist could

follow me with relative ease were important goals set in Lesu.

That field work - particularly the first one - is an initiation rite for the young

anthropologist is a truism. Like tribal initiation rites, it is both desired and feared.

In Lesu I found that I could cross wide cultural barriers with more ease than I had

anticipated. I could take the physical difficulties of climate and a primitive way

of living. I could stand the loneliness. I was capable of sustained hard work,

driven by curiosity and a desire for success. At the same time I learned that no

matter how hard or well I worked, there was much that eluded me. Although

my book and other publications on Lesu were well received, and I think they are

good, yet I know their limitations - all that I had not been able to learn about the

people and their society. An acceptance of limitations within myself and in the

anthropological discipline (and in all of science) was as much of an asset as the sense

of relative successful accomplishment in this first field experience. (Psychoanalysis

gives a similar lesson in the limitations of understanding one's self and of others.)

Do the best you can was the advice I evolved for myself and students going to

their first field work. This axiom became true for me when I had to face the constant

frustrations of only partial understanding in Lesu.

High standards in science (and art) are obviously important, even though they

may, or can, not be completely reached. The standards I sought to work and live

by in the field were set by Malinowski. The posthumous publication of his personal

and supposedly private Diary6 has occasioned much hostile discussion about these

standards. The Diary - a minute account of frustrations, irritations, illness and

personal anguish - reveals that Malinowski was often impatient with native

informants, cursing them when they did not keep their appointments or when they

misled him. It also showed that although he did pitch his tent in a native village

and worked intensively through the native language, he often sought the company

of Europeans - traders, district officers and others who were in his area. The critics

• Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (translated by Norbert

Guterman), New York, 1967.




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FURTHER REFLECTIONS ON LESU AND MALINOWSKFS DIARY 347

of the Diary, or rather of Malinowski, complain bitterly or facetiously that the book

destroyed the myths of Malinowski's extraordinary empathy with the natives

and of his living and working continuously with them. Actually, as I have noted

elsewhere,7 Malinowski never in writings or lectures pretended to have extra-

ordinary empathy and he was quite candid about the difficulties of living without

the company of his own kind . Whatever empathy he had with the Melanesians

probably came from acknowledging the savage and the primitive within his

own person.

Since he gave little data in his writings or lectures about his European contacts,

he did in a way set a myth about living more alone than was actually the case. The

living alone must be understood in the background of the period preceding

Malinowski's Melanesian field work. Among the major British anthropologists and

other contributors to the discipline were Tylor, Frazer, Codrington, Rivers, Haddon

and Seligman. Some had never seen a primitive society, while others participated

in surveys with relatively brief visits to native villages. Malinowski was the first to

live for an extended time among the savages as they were then called, learn their

language, and make anthropology an observational science. In spite of his frequent

visits to neighbouring European homes, he did live alone - particularly in comparison

with the field work of his predecessors. It is my impression from the Diary that he

did not find his visits with Europeans too satisfactory and that he wished he could

have done without them. He was always feeling guilty about his need for escapes,

whether through trashy novels or visiting Europeans.

Malinowski gave many concrete guide lines to his students going into the field.

But the myths which developed represent, I think, the high standards he set for

himself and could not always reach. This occurs frequently in mythology about

innovators who represent an ideal in a time of change. His students, like followers

and new converts in general, may have lived up to the tenets of the myth more than

did the medicine man who gave them to us. I, for one, have always been grateful.

We were all, probably, more successful because of the myth than we would have been

without it.

Hortense Powdermaker.

7 The New York Review of Books, November 9, 1967.


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