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Malinowski: Second Positivism, Second Romanticism Author(S): Ivan Strenski Source: Man, New Series, Vol Malinowski: Second Positivism, Second Romanticism Author(s): Ivan Strenski Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Dec., 1982), pp. 766-771 Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2802045 Accessed: 01-03-2017 23:12 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Man This content downloaded from 187.65.128.54 on Wed, 01 Mar 2017 23:12:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CORRESPONDENCE Malinowski: second positivism, empiricist/inductivist. To be sure, in Argonauts second romanticism Malinowski does advocate and practise what In a recent number of Man, Andrzej Paluch seems impossibly complete fact-gathering and (I98I: 276-85) argued the interesting historical even an incipient behaviourism (I922a: I7-22). thesis that the young Malinowski was formed But both Argonauts and The Diary of the same by the so-called 'second positivism' of Avenar- period reveal that Malinowski did not believe in ius and Mach, mediated through the Polish 'objectively existing facts: theory creates facts'. philosophers, Straszewski and Pawlicki. I Data had to be subordinated to the 'final syn- would argue not that Paluch is wrong about the thesis' (Firth I98I: io8; Leach I966: 565; Mali- influences of the 'second positivism,' but that he nowski I922a: 5I7). Fact-mongering (I922a: tells a very incomplete story about the intellec- 5I7) was an object of Malinowski's disdain. In tual shape of the young Malinowski-a story I Argonauts, facts are gathered and behaviour believe Paluch himself admits makes far less closely observed in the service of the empathetic sense than it ought. Malinowski was as much 'understanding' of native life-something he (more, if we focus on The Argonauts of the would later indeed call 'dangerous guesswork' Western Pacific, a product of the 'second roman- (I944: 23). In the remarkable concluding pages, ticism', as he was of any 'second positivism'. Malinowski brings these points to a resound- Moreover, it is only by assuming this perspec- ingly romantic and unpositivistic conclusion: tive that Argonauts becomes intelligible, that Malinowski's arguments with colonial adminis- I have tried to pave my account with fact and trators make sense, that his choice of subject- details . But at the same time, my convic- matter shows a certain plan, and that his own tion, as expressed over and over again, is that good-will confessions of a radical intellectual what matters really is not the detail, not the transformation leading to the empiricist/posi- fact, but the scientific use we make of it. tivist Malinowski we know so well have credi- Thus, the details and technicalities. acquire bility at all. I am talking about Paluch's numer- their meaning in so far only as they express ous references to places where 'Malinowski some central attitude of mind of the natives diverges from the positivist programme', where he 'represents a standpoint opposed to' What interests me really in the study of the positivism (I98I: 280), where his 'positivist native is his outlook on things, his Weltans- spectacles' were 'not very strong' (I98I: 279) chauung, the breath of life and reality which he and even where Paluch declares that Malinows- breathes and by which he lives . a definite ki 'was not an adherent of. radical empiric- vision of the world, a definite zest of life ism' (I98I: 279). I am talking about what to (I922a: 5I7). Paluch seems the exception, but the more we read both Paluch and the early Malinowski must To his credit, Leach at least records that this seem the rule-Malinowski's part in the 'second youthful Malinowski put theory before facts, romanticism', perhaps better known in its na- even if he (Leach) does not seem to be able to tive German, 'neuromantik' (Bauman I973: 26; capitalise on this observation (I966: 565). In- Ermarth I978: 79-90; Without denying his stead of linking Malinowski's view directly positivist nurture, I want to show how Mali- with contemporary continental romantic think- nowski was a complex and substantial mixture ing, Leach can only make sense of Malinowski's of romantic and positivist, and that, at least in methodological zest for 'life' by reference to his his Argonauts, he ought to be seen as having been bitter feuds with the London cultural diffusion- dominated by a romantic agenda of fieldwork ists, Elliot Smith and Perry. and scholarship. The London diffusionists were indeed the The most regrettable part of Paluch's reading butt of Malinowski's jibes against 'curio- of the early Malinowski is its repetition of what hunting'-a short-hand reference to the has become conventional wisdom. For Jarvie museum anthropology nurtured by Elliot (I964) and Leach (i964; I966) Malinowski was Smith and Perry. At the bottom of Malinow- always a consistent and perennial positivist ski's aversion to London diffusionism was, it This content downloaded from 187.65.128.54 on Wed, 01 Mar 2017 23:12:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CORRESPONDENCE 767 seems, a distaste for the dry and lifeless, which in much the same way as Malinowski does. emerged in his defence of the 'new' functional They (and he) did so in the name of a renewal of method. I want to recommend taking this humanism and humanistic studies (Malinowski aspect of Malinowski's arguments against dif- I922b: 2I5; I935; I944: 4; I967: 254, 267; Paluch fusionism as seriously as we have taken his I98I: 283; Ringer I969: ch. 6, 7; Symmons- critique of their speculative historical construc- Symonolewicz I959: 28). They (and he) aimed tions. For what it may be worth, Malinowski at the synthetic knowledge of man rather than maintained life-long, frequently amicable, in- the narrow specialisation they thought charac- tellectual relations with the German-speaking terised the natural scientific and technological cultural diffusionists such as Boas, Frobenius, disciplines. They (and he) indulged a distaste for Graebner, Schmidt and of course Lowie. Was it modernity and urbanisation (Lowie I937: 234; merely an accident that these scholars often Malinowski I930; Ringer 1969: 42-6I); they self-consciously acknowledged their debt to feared the 'revolt of the masses' (Malinowski German romanticism, and that they, along with I932; Ringer I969: 2I3-52). Not surprisingly, the British, were also real protagonists and they chiefly recruited members from the pro- pioneers of empirical fieldwork? (Heine- fessional, traditional and landed classes rather Geldern I964:4I0; Stocking I974: Introduction, from the new rising 6lites of commerce and Part I). When we speak about Malinowski's trade. Malinowski himself belonged to a minor opposition to diffusionism, it might perhaps be class of landed gentry called szlachta; his father best to distinguish the British from the Germans was professor of the Jagiellonian University in and Austrians, and to observe that most of Cracow and took his Ph. D. from Leipzig. Here Malinowski's explicit critical ire was aimed at is the Malinowski who despite his patriotic fears the British. for Poland in the first world war speaks sym- If, then, Paluch is correct to locate positivism pathetically of German culture (I967: 203, 207), early in Malinowski's career, perhaps romantic- particularly in contrast to the English 'lack of ism is also located equally early there as well. In enthusiasm, idealism, purpose'. In a view typi- the early I920'S this sometimes meant that Mali- cal of a Central European intellectual of his day, nowski would run the two streams together for Malinowski admired the Germans for their his own polemical purposes. In Argonauts, Mali- 'purpose, possibly lousy . but there is an nowski manipulates the notion of 'life' in the elan, there is a sense of mission' (I967: 208). way one might expect this half-positivist, half- Here is the Malinowski who still wrote in Ger- romantic to do, informing it with varying pro- man for German journals, notably, Die Geistes- portions of vitalist and biological meaning wissenschaften (Firth I98I: I07; Malinowski (I922a: 22). In the year that Argonauts appeared I9I4; Symmons-Symonolewicz I958: 70 (I922), the essay 'Ethnology and the Study of sqq.). Society' treated the notion of life in a familiar If one turns attention to more specific 'in- way ('zest for life') (I922b: 2I0); at the same time fluences' on Malinowski a good case can be it spoke of 'every item of culture' having a made for the importance of Wilhelm Wundt. 'positive, biological significance' (I922b: 214). But we have till now only imagined that By contrast, the less adaptable term 'spirit' Wundt's influence was restricted to passing on (I922a: 22) seems to drop out of his vocabulary ethnological notions, such as the idea of the by I923. I argue simply that at least until the 'cultural whole' derived from Volkerpsychologie early I 920'S Malinowski seemed eager and adept (I910) (Leach I964: I2I, I26; Cf. Paluch 198I: at playing both the positivist and romantic sides 279). This would fit nicely with the timing of of selected issues, because he was divided be- Malinowski's stay in Leipzig (I908-I9I0). Yet tween positivist and romantic methodologies. not so well known in English-speaking circles is Once the possibility of a serious romantic the Wundt of Die Ethik (I886) and its successor, methodological element in Malinowski's Die Nationen und ihre Philosophie (i9i5).
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