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About Malinowski &c.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1946. A Note on Functional Anthropology. Man 46: 38-41.

In current onthropological literature one comes across references to 'functional anthropology.' I find myself sometimes referred to as one of its representatives or founders. For example, Goldenweiser has written, 'The prophets of the New Functionalism 'are A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and Bronisław Malinowski.' The name 'functional anthropology' was invented by Malinowski in 1926 and was used by him as a label for his own teaching. We must therefore go to his writings for a definition of what the term means. (Radcliffe-Brown 1946: 38)

Functional anthropology. Endonymic. Good to know. // Egocentrism: both Montagu and Radcliffe-Brown re-iterate either personal experiences or mentions of their name.

Malinowski began his study of social anthropology in 1910 at the London School of Economics. One of his earliest published papers ['Plemienne zwiazki w Australii (Tribal male associations of the Australian Aborigenes),' Bulletin de l'Académie des Sciences de Cracovie, Avril-Mai-Juin, 1912.] on the subject was one on the Australian aboigenes, of which I shall possess the copy he gave me. The paper dealt with what he called men's associations. He wrote (p. 60): 'The sociological reason, i.e. the function or task that a given institution performs in society, is often confused with its aim, as subjectively conceived by society. Keeping these two different questions strictly apart, we shall try broadly to answer both. To begin with the first, our task is to show what the chief social functions of these male societies are, what part they play in the integration of the various other institutions, and wherein lies their general importance for the whole social structure.' This gives a clear idea of what Malinowski understood as the social function of an institution at that time. (Radcliffe-Brown 1946: 38)

Apparently Malinowski understood that there is a difference between function and aim; if I had to hazard a guess I'd think that one is actual use and the other the idealized end-goal. And that he may be using "mn" and "men" literally, as opposed to the figurative all-humanity-compassing quality of some earlier authors. // Actually, it's not at all clear what he means by this. Currently I see it in the sense that the raison d'être of an institution is its function, not its aim. The crucial terms, function and aim, remain undefined.

In choosing the name functional anthropology Malinowski was influenced by the fact that Dean Roscoe Pound had established at Harvard a Functional School of Jurisprudence, and he had in mind the statement of Roscoe Pound printed in the preceding year: 'Perhaps the most significant advance in the modern science of law is the change from the analytic to the functional standpoint. The word over, the jurist of to-day seeks to discover and appraise the social effects of legal institutions andand legal doctrines in action.' It may be noted that Roscoe Pound speaks of 'social effects.' (Radcliffe-Brown 1946: 39)

Actually a valuable lead: in my case back to Ruesch's seventh question to the communication researcher.

When we are defining abstract terms there is no question of one definition being right and another wrong, but only of which definition gives us the most useful tool for scientific analysis and generalization. (Radcliffe-Brown 1946: 39)

A truism that currently goes above my head. Theory-construction.

Round about 1930 Malinowski's views on social anthropology underwend considerable change. He had gradually come to think of the subject as concerned not with the social relations and interactions of human beings but with 'culture.' His views at this time are expressed in his article on 'Culture' in the Encyclopædia of the Social Sciences. His new conception of function can be seen in his discussion of the 'function' of a digging-stick. 'The simplest as well as the most elaborate artifact is defined by its function, the part which it plays within a system of human activities: it is defined by the ideas which are connected with it and by the values which surround it.' It is no longer a question of an intuition having a social function but rather of the use of a material object. (Radcliffe-Brown 1946: 39)

Another valuable lead. Curiously, whereas he appears to oppose the use of feelings and ideas in social intercourse, he does not abstain from using the same intellectual apparatus of collective consciousness in other cases.

The definition of 'plain and pure' functional anthropology is as follows: 'Funcitonalism is, in its essence, the theory of transformation of organic - that is, individual - needs into derived cultural necessities and imperatives.' The 'function' of any social or cultural feature of a society, by preference to which it is to be explained or understood, is its relation to what are called the basic biological needs of individuals, namely, 'nutrition, reproduction, bodily comforts, safety, relaxation, movement, and growth.' (Radcliffe-Brown 1946: 39)

More inconsistency for me - the very thing he opposed in his early publications he appears to be attempting to solve in his later years. How the individual desire transforms into a collective one is a tough nut.

Functional anthropology in its final phase may be defined, therefore, as the study of then biological function of culture or institutions. Social, or, as Herbert Spencer called them, super-organic, phenomena are found amongst many species of animals besides man. In many species the aggregation of individuals has a biological function giving the individual a somewhat better chance of survival. (Radcliffe-Brown 1946: 40)

This is a pretty heavy accusation, is it not? The conditional "its final phase may" makes it suspicious.

A social system is a system of ordered social relations in a given collection of human beings. The social function of a religion, of a system of law or morals or etiquette, is the contribution it makes to creating or maintaining the equilibrium of the system. The view is taken by some of us that the study of social functions in this sense is a necessary part of any attempt to arrive at an understanding of the characteristics of human societies. (Radcliffe-Brown 1946: 40)

Everything is ordered and balanced for the cyberneticist-man. // National character could stand for the ethnogenic characteristics of human societies.

Montagu, Ashley M. F. 1942. Brinoslaw Malinowski (1884-1942). Isis 34(2): 146-150.

As a gestating Child of the Sun it was late in October 1923 that I presented myself at Malinowski's office at the London School of Economics, a handsome room which at that time Malinowski shared with Professor C. J. Seligman. Malinowski received me most cordially, and I was at once enchanted. There was nothing of the stuffed shirt about him; he put you at your ease at once, and made you feel that you and he were going to have a fascinating time exploring human nature together. J. C. Flügel of University College was the only other teacher whom I had known up to that time who was just like that, and I was very happy indeed to run into just such another. I mentioned with what pleasure I had read Malinowski's now famous essay "The Problem of Meaning in Primitive [|] Languages" in Ogden and Richard's Meaning of Meaning (London, Kegan Paul; New York, Harcourt Brace, 1923) which had appeared earlier the year. This pleased him very much. (Montagu 1942: 146-147)

High praise. Not at all like the one I read about Dale Carnegie.

Early in 1914 Malinowski set out with the Robert Mond Expedition to new Guinea and North-West Melanesia. Altogether he made six field trips to this area between 1914 and 1919. Most of the time was spent in the Trobriand Islands, but not before a good many months had passed among the natives of Mailu in the territory of New Guinea. The fruits of Malinowski's studies in this last region were published in two monographs: the first, Primitive Religion and Social Differentiation, was written in Polish and published at Cracow in 1915, and the second was a study entitled "The Natives of Mailu," published in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australi for 1915. (Montagu 1942: 148)

Behind the language barrier, like more than several of Jakobson's writings (particularly the Polish illustrations to "Linguistics and Poetics").

In August 1936 Malinowski arrived at Cambridge as one of the distinguished guests invited to attend the Harvard Tercentenary Celebrations. His lecture, "Culture as a Determinant of Behavior," drew such a large audience, or rather Malinowski's [|] name drew such a large audience, that the very commodious hall filled up long before the time scheduled for the lecture to begin, so that many hundreds of persons had to be turned away, in spite of the fact that Sir Arthur Eddington and several other world renowned scientists were lecturing in nearby halls at that time. [↩] During the morning preceding the evening of the lecture, Malinowski was interviewed by the press. The following morning I saw an account of the interview in a Boston paper. After breakfast I visited Malinowski and showed him the account of the interview. This he read with interest, and then exclaimed, "Let's go out and see what the other papers say." We bought three or four other papers and looked through them carefully, but there was not a single reference to Malinowski. With a twinkle in his eye he remarked "I'm properly deflated." (Montagu 1942: 149-150)

Vanity.

There is nothing in the least difficult to understand about functionalism, although teh amount of misunderstanding which has grown up about it within recent years might suggest that there was something particularly abstruse or recondite involved. This is not the case. (Montagu 1942: 149)

Amusing.

Among these students of Malinowski are E. E. Evans-PRitchard, Raymond Firth, Ian Hogbin, A. P. Elkin, I. Schapera, Reo Fortune, Lucy Mair, Hortense Powdermaker, Audrey Richards, Phyllis Kaberry, and there are as many more, all of whom hae done distinguished work in the field, and most of whom are now spreading the inspiration which they received from Malinowski's teaching and personality. (Montagu 1942: 150)

A pleb knows only two. How long would it take to get a handle on all of them?

Cultures are living entities, they cannot be studied in fragments, because they do not function as such; they function as complex wholes, ad it is as such that they should be studied. Every process within the culture must be studied not as an isolate but in its functional interrelations with every other cultural process within the culture. Culture is dynamic, not static, hence it must be investigated as a functioning whole. In this way the culture may be understood as a functional whole, and almost everything within it may be perceived in its true relation to everything else. (Montagu 1942: 150)

Everything is holistic, interrelated, and dynamic for miss organicist.

The field worker observes human beings acting within an environmental setting, natural and artificial; influenced by it, and in turn transforming it in co-operation with each other. He studies how men and women are motivated in their mutual relations by feelings of attraction and repulsion, by co-operative duties and privileges, by profits drawn and sacrifices made. The invisible network of social bonds, of which the organization of the group is made up, is defined by charters and codes - technological, legal, customary, and moral - to which every individual is differentially submitted, and which integrate the group into a whole. Since all rules and all tribal traditions are expressions in words - that is, symbols - the understanding of social organization implies an analysis of symbolism and language. (Malinowski 1939; in Montagu 1942: 151)

From: "The group and the individual in functional analysis," American Journal of Sociology 44(6): 939-940.

Wax, Murray L. 1972. Tenting with Malinowski. American Sociological Review 37(1): 1-13.

The case of the Torres Straits Expedition of 1898-99 is instructive, as in the judgment of Evans-Pritchard (1951: 73), it
...had many weaknesses. However well the men who carried it out might have been trained in systematic research in one or another of the natural sciences, the short time they spent among the peoples they studied, their ignorance of their languages, and the casualness and superficiality of their contacts with the natives did not permit deep investigation.
This acquiescence of renowned scholars to this kind of superficial fieldwork with exotic peoples cannot be explained by their ignorance of science or indifference to its canons. Something more is involved. (Wax 1972: 2)

Ironically this is exactly the conclusion I would have drawn on Malinowski's linguistic work.

Together with other historians of anthropology and sociology, I would suggest that fieldwork in the 19th century was inhibited by the ideology and politics of the time. Ideologically, the doctrine of social evolutionism predominated. Leading social thinkers, like August Comte, Herbert Spencer, or Edward B. Tylor looked to th exotic or in current parlance "technologically primitive" peoples of the world to learn about the evolution of man. (Wax 1972: 2)

Ironically, this is not the impression I've formed from Spencer, whose comparative psychology is "scientific racism" for sure but doesn't appear to look towards the "Bushman" for signs of evolution. Rather, per Giddings, I'd thing that social evolutionism had to do with the activity of the social mind.

In any case, his diary reveals that during this first expedition, he met some clearly antagonistic responses: natives laughed at his inquiries, stared at him, lied to him, and were rowdy in dealing with him (cf. 1967: 31, 43). (Wax 1972: 5)

This is indeed the impression from the subtext of his remarks related to PC in Argonauts. Particularly this: "As soon as an interesting stranger arrives, half the village assembles around him, talking loudly and making remarks about him, frequently uncomplimentary, and altogether assuming a tone of jocular familiarity." (Malinowski 1922: 52)

During a visit to the Trobriand Islands, he noted the Paramount Chief seated on his high platform. This custom ensured that nobody stood higher than the chief, and made it possible for his subjects to pass him without their having to crawl on the ground. Sir William "saw the chief sitting high, in his seat of honor, walked straight up to him, seized him by the hair, and dragged him to the ground, and took his seat himself. "No one," said Sir William, "shall sit higher in New Guinea than I."
Subsequently in 1915 when Malinowski arrived in Omarkana, he found (1935: I, 84) that the Paramount Chief, To'uluwa was
...a shrewd, well-balanced man, but his pride had been broken by the European invasion, and he had retired from most of his offices.
(Wax 1972: 5)

No wonder Malinowski ends Argonauts with a sad-song for the chief's loss of joy in life.

As one of his students has remarked (Leach 1965: viii):
In 1914, ethnographers, Malinowski included, still viewed their subject matter with considerable contempt. They studied "the manners and customs of primitive savages" and "primitive" meant not only simple and childish but primeval. Primitive peoples were thought of as zoological specimens; the behavior of a New Guinea native was expected to throw some light upon our own Stone Age ancestors but he was not regarded as interesting as a human being in his own right. The standard methods of ethnographic research were such that the social superiority of the investigation was being constantly emphasized. The "native" was a specimen to be measured and photographed and interviewed - through an interpreter.
(Wax 1972: 8)

Damn. Malinowski accused of the same thing as Spencer.

Sometimes, Malinowski (1935/1965: 211-212) speaks of Trobriander, Briton, and Pole as being equally savage:
Cricket, which to an Englishman has become a synonym for honour and sportsmanlike behaviour, is to a Kiriwian [Trobriander], a cause for violent quarreling and strong passion, as well as a newly invented sytem of gambling; while to another type of savage, a Pole, it remains pointless - a tedious manner of time-wasting.
[...] Malinowski could consider himself, the British colonist, and the Trobriand natives as equally human in the anthropological abstract, but in the concreteness of daily interaction, he considered himself a member of an intellectual and esthetic elite, superior to both. (Wax 1972: 9)

Again, damn. This attitude is reflected in PC.

Any serious reading of Malinowski's Trobriand monographs would reveal that only by marrying a Trobriand woman, entering the web of kinship obligations and reciprocities, and engaging with the other men of the village in intensive agriculture would he have lived as a Trobriand. Instead, Malinowski established himself in the heart of native villages in the style of a petty lord attended by a large retinue of personal servants. Compared to Britons elsewhere, he had few funds, but in the Trobriand archipelago the monies he did control went a long way. So situated, housed, and served, he was able to observe and gossip with the natives about village events, though he scarcely participated in them. From his diaries, it is evident that the greater part of his researches involved quizing [|] strategic informants; that is, his field technique closely resembled earlier ethnographic inquiry, with the important difference that Malinowski's inquiry took place in the heart of the native habitat and could be tested. (Wax 1972: 10-11)

Yup. Hence his emphasis on gossip.

Paluch, Andrzej K. 1981. The Polish Background to Malinowski's Work. Man 16(2): 276-285.

Sociology, ethnology and other social sciences concentrated on studies of natinal identity, national culture, and on the detailed examination of the role of different social groups in the process of social change which took place in a country divided between three alien powers. (Paluch 1981: 277)

Hence the many statements about national character.

His first works in Polish would seem to be crucial for an exploration of the origins of his functionalism as well as for the interpretation of some of his ideas. (Paluch 1981: 277)

Let's hope so.

His turn towards social anthropology after reading Frazer's The Golden Bough is not so irrational when one realises that he attended lectures and seminars on philosophy, psychology, and the history of Polish literature. His doctoral dissertation in 1908 was in philosophy, entitled On the principle of the economy of thought, written under the supervision of Professor Stefan Pawlicki. (Paluch 1981: 278)

A further reason to pay closer attention to Spencer and James.

If one can describe the philosophy of the second part of the nineteenth century as scientism, minimalism, nominalism, empiricism, naturalism and positivism, then the beginning of the twentieth century brought Logische Untersuchungen by Husserl, La science et l'hipothèse by Poincaré, Filosofia dello spirito by Croce, Logic der reinen Erkenntnis by Cohen, Humanism by Schiller, and L'évolution créatrice by Bergson. Surely it was one of the most varied and interesting periods in European philosophy. (Paluch 1981: 278)

A reading list for my retirement years? Should check out if they're all available in English already.

This principle is one of the fundamental theses of positivist epistemology and has two versions: the psychological one of Avenarius and the methodological one of Mach. Malinowski tries to answer the question, to what extent this principle contributes to the destruction of metaphysical philosophy, as these particular philosophers had intended. Malinowski is not able to accept the principle of the economy of thought in Avenarius's version and he prefers - with some reservation - Mach's view, which treats this principle as a methodological one. The function and genesis of science cannot, as Avenarius had wanted, be explained just by psychological laws. These must be taken within the framework of the relationship man-world, and this relationship is defined by human biological needs. (Paluch 1981: 279)

A valuable insight concerning "man's nature in society" (PC 3.1), and the framing of human company as a necessity of life.

Malinowski's standpoint thus rises from and refers to positivism in its late nineteenth-century form. The influence of Mach especially is easily identifiable in all his works, from the doctoral thesis to A scientific theory of culture. Two highly important questions in his anthropology come from this positivist heritage: (1) an emphasis on functional explanations and (2) a notion of culture as an instrumental whole. They are used first in the doctoral thesis to organise the discussion and argument. Malinowski considers practical application to be the criterion which differentiates science from 'religious inspiration'. Practical utility 'is the decisive criterion of the value of the strictly scientific investigation', and the last instange of verification of scientific statements is the activity of man confronted with the external world. In this context the main problem of Malinowski's doctoral thesis, the principle of the economy of thought, 'is completely accurate because it manifests the role played by the functions of the human brain with regard to the mastering of the external world' (Malinowski 1908). (Paluch 1981: 279)

Possible source of his anthropological functionalism, and a source for his apparent "organicism" (for lack of a better term). The highlight on practical utility should implement the utility of pleasure, and "the mastering of the external world" could tie in with social relations.

In his first published Polish article, Totemizm i egzogamia (Totemism and exogamy), Malinowski write: 'The final aim of all scientific investigations are facts, the study of links and relations between them, and, what follows, the capability of a precise and comprehensive description and presentation. (Paluch 1981: 279)

Relevant for "phatic theory", looks like a curiosity shop of single specimens without a comprehensive framework. // Not to mention preciseness.

In the work quoted previously, Malinowski also writes: 'The fewer hypothetical assumptions and postulates included in a given description of facts, the greater the value of this description, but because every precise description of facts requires precise concepts, and these can be taken only from a theory, every description and classification therefore has necessarily to be based on a theoretical foundation' ([Malinowski] 1911: 35-36). (Paluch 1981: 280)

From Malinowski, B. 1911. Totemizm i egzogamia. (Part I). Lud 17(2): 31-56. Sadly, I'd say that PC is saturated with hypothetical assumptions.

In current general opinion Malinowski is viewed as a brilliant empiricist and field-worker and a rather uninteresting and uninspiring theoretician. Such an opinion is not especially deep and is in fact impossible to defend. It could have been a question of personality, of a scientific temperament more at home with empirical research than with systematic, logical and abstract discourse. However, this was not the case with Malinowski. He had had, at least in [|] Cracow, very good logical training and had learned to work at the leel of theory. Today's evaluation is therefore puzzling. (Paluch 1981: 281-282)

The image of Malinowski as a field-worker trumps that of Malinowski the man of letters. But indeed his theoretical side hints at broad readings, whch is now somewhat difficult to trace because of sparse citations.

To some degree Malinowski's style of practicing science is responsible for such an opinion. His unrestricted treatment of his own statements on the level of theory can irritate a cool and systematic mind. But this should not be any real obstacle in deep analytical work. (Paluch 1981: 282)

Phraseology for the peripatetic contradictions / apophatic definition.

Contrary to that, when Malinowski analyses concrete social reality, such attributes of human kind as thought, emotion, tradition, all of them expressed in the context of changing social situations, play a decisive role. The general conception of culture is, however, the same on both levels. It can be described by four slogans: 'culture is a whole'; 'it is an integral system'; 'it has a functional character; 'it is an instrumental apparatus'. They do not, however, always mean exactly the same. [↩] All the above slogans, except the first one, have differing meanings in his empirical and theoretical works. Thus, the second slogan on the empirical level means: (1) all human behaviour has its dysfunctions, but there are social mechanisms which integrate the cultural system. At a theoretical level it means: (2) all human behaviour helps to keep the cultural system an integral whole. The difference and its consequences are enormous. The third slogan means: (1) any element of culture is interrelated with any other and with the whole system; (2) any element of culture is related to human needs. And the [|] fourth slogan means: (1) culture is an apparatus which makes possible the process of adaptation of individuals to their social and natural milieu, which in fact determines social continuity; (2) culture is an apparatus which makes possible the satisfaction of human needs. (Paluch 1981: 282-283)

cf. "artificially formed unions, and of those self-perpetuating communities" (Giddings 1896: 3-4) and "Even when men have become unified by sympathies and beliefs, the possibility of perpetuating their union is a question of the character and resources of their environment" (ibid, 82).

His positivist bias bore fruits which - as his pupils and critics, from Raymond Firth to Edmund Leach, noticed very quickly - were on the level of not specially deep and sensitive common-sense knowledge. As a result, we have in Malinowski's output two visions of cultural reality: one illustrated by him in his fieldwork; another developed by him in abstract terms, and which fails to be satisfactory. (Paluch 1981: 283)

Wow. This is an exact summary of my own investigation of PC. It is a common-sense notion, and theoretically unsatisfactory, in abstract ("PC"), and something almost completely different in field-work (Argonauts). The question now is to examine this misalignment, this "mangling" of experience into tokens.

These kinds of studies constitute - to be exact - the history of social science. It has, however, a deeper sense besides simply the writing of the history of a discipline. Classics are often a source of inspiration to further research, but, above all, a study of them is the only way to develop theoretical self-consciousness, to understand both external and internal conditions of scientific questions. (Paluch 1981: 284; note 5)

Epigraphic, maybe even sidebar-worthy. This sentiment rings true in my own research here. Theoretical self-consciousness is also something necessary for "phatic study" to take off and the unification of many findings commence.

These are three excerpts from Malinowski's letters: 'At the moment I am working on the history of philosophy. I am reading about Aristotle in Piat's book which you, Father, have recommended and lent to me. I am looking over Zeller as well. At the same time I am waiting for you, Father, to clarify some doubtful points for me. Nowhere can I find these arguments clarified clearly.' 'For the time being I am engaged in causality, reading Lange's Kausal Problem and Mach's latest book which I would like to discuss in detail with you.' 'I am waiting with great impatience for the moment when you, Father, will be with us again and will be able to calm all my philosophical doubts and worries.' (Letters are published in Flis and Paluch 1980.) (Paluch 1981: 284; note 6)

James Porter (2017) was right. Aristotle's "Friendship" is relevant for PC.

In the English translation of Malinowski's diary there are some blatant errors (the most spectacular one: Polish 'nigrowie' and its inflexional forms 'nigrom', 'nigrach', 'nigrami', etc., does not mean 'niggers', and has a neutral connotation); [...] (Paluch 1981: 284; note 9)

A Polish response to a bit in the previous paper: "In defense of her teacher, Hortense Powdermaker (1967) contended that some of the offensive terminology could be an artifact of translation. Unfortunately, for her thesis, the polyglot Malinowski used words and phrases from many languages in these diaries, and "nigger" was among them (1967: xxi, 154)." (Wax 1972: 3) - It looks like Malinowski was the O.G. "nigger-guy".

Payne, Harry C. 1981. Malinowski's Style. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 125(6): 416-440

That surface validity, though, breaks down, especially as one moves from the hard-core physical sciences toward the social sciences. Insofar as style involves a psycholigac relationship between the writer and his subjecs and audience, it is difficult to suppress those elements which produces style. (Payne 1981: 416)

Somehow this sounds like a phatic trope, a mixture between Jakobson's psychological connection and the metacommunication in Richards and Gardiner (where the medium is the printed page).

First, Malinowski was a principal inventor of the discipline of modern fieldwork and ethnography. As such, his methodologicy had much more leeway than later revisionists and followers. No matter how much the method may seem, in retrospect, inherent in things and not dependent on the creator, a large measure of the latter's style shaped the discipline and those who work in its wake. Exploring the original methodology in the most thorough and imaginative way possible is essential for understanding it and its fate. (Payne 1981: 416)

Another way of saying that Malinowski was famous and influential, and that his field-work methods as well as ethnographic writing style are emulated habitually by modern workers. This is comparable to the terminological innovation effect (stemming from the quasi-mythological demon of terminological invention) observed in the hundred years of use history for "phatic".

Second, Malinowski is a man of many puzzles and contradictions. Intellectual historians usually rely on conventional methods of explanation: "X said Y because he had read A, B, C"; "X said Y because it was in his interest to say it"; "X said Y because his theories droe him to that conclusion or observation." These methods, though, have trouble with puzzles and contradictions. This difficulty is especially apparent in those attempting to write the intellectual history of their own disciplines, both because they tend to be caught up so much in the problem of theories and schools, and because their histories tend to be ruthlessly teleological, culminating in whatever the reigning theory happens to be. (Payne 1981: 416)

I had planned to use the words "paradoxes" and "contradictions" to describe what I designate here as the peripatetic contradictions (not communication of feelings, actions, and thoughts) / apophatic definition (a shaky three-legged stool). Luckily, I don't have to explain that "X said Y because he had read A, B, C" because I can just quote both instances and it should be obvious that they are complementary, having the same token of experience, rhetorical purpose, or concrete argument in common. Maybe it could be a case of "vulgar" influence, i.e. how the Estonian literary author Eduard Vilde also writes in words like ties and bonds of fellowship and common sentiment, yet if Malinowski is quoted in the same piece directly addressing A, B, C, sometimes all in a row exactly like that, then it should be obvious.

Stylistic exploration is devoted to seeing the utility beneath puzzles, and, once finding the patterns not immediately obvious, opening up new questions and further explanations. Such an exploration is perhaps best attempted by a historian from outside the discipline in question. Ideally he has new questions to raise and less contrained eyes to look. This historian has some of the advantages of the social anthropologist. He is a fieldworker in a strange, but not unfathomable, land, responsive to the assumptions of what he studies but not bound by them. (Payne 1981: 116-117)

In my case the less contrained eye amounts to a modern perspective, an overview of what new assumptions have been added, how the assumptions themselves have changed or altered the core questions. This naturally brings up new questions, one circling around Tarde's imitation, the influence of one to many, and another around Durkheim and the pooling together of information to sift and sieve something binding out of it.

Finding Malinowski criticism dominated by personal and theoretical animus, I decided to undertake a more systematic study of Malinowski through his style. I had some examples to help serve as a guide. The historian Peter Gay has written two works, Style in History (1974) and Art and Act (1976), which I consider models of method, though I am aware that historians and artists are more obviously the object of stylistic analysis. Two influential writers have explored in some detail the notion of social science perceived as art. Robert Nisbet, in Sociology as an Art Form (1976), made the case for the use of metaphor and imagery in sociology, though he seems more interested in the psychology of discovery than in the methods of exposition. Stanley Hyman, in The Tangled Bank (1959), has explored the writings of Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Frazer, reading them through a literary critic's eyes. He shows that scientists and social scientists have used highly charged language; he leaves entirely uncertain the ramifications of that discovery. Steven Marcus's Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (1974) is uneven, but provocative as an example. (Payne 1981: 417)

Sadly, my criticism is motivated by the same - though the "want to reduce the text to a psychological symptom" (ibid, 417) is strong, I would expect to read his living works before his posthumous personal diary. It's appealing because from the little I've gathered here it does appear that Malinowski's "phatic communion" is not only an example of his theoretical mode of action but also a slightly veiled abstract of his social experiences with the Papuan native community and the uneducated London man-in-the-street. At this point I'm not sure how much of it is prejudice-seeking projection.

'Rivers is the Rider Haggard of anthroyology;
I shall be the Conrad.
(Malinowski to Mrs. B. Z. Seligman)
Malinowski had a habit of muffing his lines. At the right moment he often said the wrong thing - or, at least, what appears to be the wrong thing. His casual invocation of Conrad in his remark to Mrs. Seligman is a case in poin.t Someone with Malinowski's ambition to transform social anthropology into a true science ought not, one would think, to invoke a novelist. (Payne 1981: 417)

This finally sent me to look these names up. Haggard (is it Hagrid?) is a Victorian novelist (died 1924) who wrote about Africa (e.g. King Solomon's Mines) and Conrad a son of a Polish man of letters who became a competing Victorian novelist (also died 1924) who wrote about the stories he heard from seamen on ships because he was a captain (of a boat, not a dinghy). Started reading Conrad's famous non-fiction preface to his Narcissus, in which I find Malinowskianisms.

Conrad, Joseph 1914. Preface. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'. New YorK: Doubleday & Company, Inc.

A [Slav] in a British forecastle is a lonely being. He has no chums. Yet [Bronisław Malinowski], afraid of death and making her his accomplice was an impostor of some character - mastering our compassion, scornful of our sentimentalism, triumphing over our suspicions. (Conrad 1914: 9)

Fun fun I'm going to replace the main character's name with that of Bronisław "perhaps the Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that of Western Europeans" Malinowski (1922: 21). PC "natural enemy" and "expression of sympathy".

But in the book he is nothing; he is merely the centre of the ship's collective psychology and the pivot of the action. Yet he, who in the family circle and amongst my friends is familiarly referred to as the [Slav], remains very precious to me. (Conrad 1914: 9)

The position of the ethnographer, ideally, in his own writing. Malinowski was sometimes quite literally the captain of a dinghy, and his ethnographic observations do center around him, his outings, his intercourse and getting-on with the natives.

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the conditions of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential - their one illuminating and convincing quality - the very truth of their existence. (Conrad 1914: 11)

Cf. statements about the universe of things vs. constellations of understanding (La Barre); "the fundamental tendency which makes the mere presence of others a necessity for man" (PC 3.3); and the adjective of abstract quality, "phatic".

The artist, then, like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal. Impressed by the aspect of the world the thnker plunges into ideas, the scientist into facts - whence, presently, emerging they make their appeal to those qualities of our being that fit us best for the hazardous enterprise of living. (Conrad 1914: 11)

In this discrimination I am a thinker (mõtleja) and not a scientist (teadlane). Life as a hazardous enterprise is simply poetic. Is life... "alarming and dangerous"? // This alarming and dangerous business of living.

They speak authoritatively to our common-sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism - but always to our credulity. And their words are heard with reverence, for their concern is with weighty matters: with [|] the cultivation of our minds and the proper care of our bodies, with the attainment of our ambitions, with the perfection of the means and the glorification of our precious aims. (Conrad 1914: 11-12)

Appeals to desires apparently related to strange and unpleasant feelings; fears of strangers and interesting happenings; our personal accounts of our views and life histories; ambition and vanity.

The changing wisdom of successive generations discards ideas, questions facts, demolishes theories. (Conrad 1914: 12)

Es muy importante.

But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom: to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition - and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives, to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation - and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations. (Conrad 1914: 12)

Bonds of fellowship. Feeling of fellowship and the bonds of solidarity. These are the right tracks.

For, if any part of truth dwells in the belief confessed above, it becomes evident that there is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a passing glance of wonder and pity. (Conrad 1914: 13)

I'll note here that "dark corner" and "of the earth that does not deserve" are underlined in the scanned book I'm reading.

Fiction - if it at all aspires to be art - appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. (Conrad 1914: 13)

Thus, "national character" is an appeal to temperament; in "a pleasant atmosphere of polite, social intercourse" pleasantness is emotional and politeness is moral. The reaching for "the secret spring of responsive emotions" really recalls the preface of an Ann Coulter book, which praised some metaphorical "light socket" into which you can "plug" every contentious political issue you want (or are clever enough to select) and moral stirring will follow. This is, in phraseology, a figure of speech for political propaganda.

[...] it is only through an unremitting never-discouraging care for the shape and ring of sentences that an approach can be made to plasticity, to colour, and that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage. (Conrad 1914: 13-14)

Contours; the "more plastic and more naturally savage" "Slavonic nature"; the magic actuation of demons; a centennial usage.

To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its colour, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its colour, reveal the substance of its truth - disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at least the present vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in [|] mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world. (Conrad 1914: 14-15)

The insincerity of expressions of sympathy; "an assembly of human beings, who behave seriously or jocularly, with earnest concentration or with bored frivolity" (Malinowski 1922: 21). Evidently "solidarity" is closer to Malinowski's "sympathy" (union/communion).

In that uneasy solitude the supreme cry of Art for Art itself, loses the exciting ring of its apparent immorality. (Conrad 1914: 15)

That "strange and unpleasant" tension again.

Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what that fellow may be at. We watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; [...] (Conrad 1914: 15)

Hence functional anthropology: knowing the purpose behind the native fellow's labours.

[...] we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understand his object, and, after all, the fellow [|] has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength - and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way - and forget. (Conrad 1914: 15-16)

Atmosphere → feeling → frame of mind. - "It is not too much to hazard that the Paramount Chief and his peers, each of whom possessed important kinds of socially necessary magic, might have hoped that Malinowski in turn had a magical power to assist them with the British. Such an expectation would explain his ability to elicit from them vast quantities of magical texts which otherwise might have been withheld. By the very principle of reciprocity Malinowski himself was to emphasize (1926) as vital to the normal operations of native institutions, he would have been expected to reciprocate with lore in manipulating the European system." (Wax 1972: 9-10, e.a.) - Oh well, forgive, go on your way, and forget. Just don't stand over me with a half-ironical, half-indulgent smile, tell about my exploits and joke about our kula.

And why did he persist in using the word "savage" - a term loaded with literary and emotional charge - when the much more neutral term "native" was ready at hand? He was aware of the incongruity: "The word," he writes, "connotes ideas of boundless liberty, or irregularity, of something extremely and extraordinarily quaint." If scientists were, as he often claimed, showing the savage to be a rule-bound sociological actor, it makes little sense to use a word burdened with assumptions of the past. (Payne 1981: 418)

Good question. Was he plugging something in?

Then he launches into a characteristic Malinowskian diatribe against a theoretical strawman: the idea of "primitive communism": "There is no more jejune and fruitless distinction in primitive sociology than that between individualism and communism. Communism as a cultural reality is possible only through the advent of the machine." So far, so good, though perhaps this was all unnecessary in the now sophisticated theoretical world of 1935. The rest just does not seem to follow:
In the measure as the human being has to serve the machine, adapt his work and his mind to mechanisms and depend on machine-made goods for his existence, a new sociological phenomenon develops. On the one hand, human beings become more useful the less differentiated they are. Man has to become an interchangeable part of the vast human mechanism which is only a counterpart of the material mechanism. On the other hand, the personal satisfaction and happiness of an individual can only be achieved if he remains completely in tune with the great average of his fellow-citizens, with who mhe has to consume the same goods, read the same newspapers, thrill to the same films, march to the same tune of the same hymns, whether these be sung in praise of communism or fascism.
The sentiments are understandable in the context of the 1930s. What, though, are they doin gas a conclusion to a rich ethnographic work on Trobriand gardening and land-tenure? He has told us what his discoveries disprove. We might righly expect a discussion of what they offer instead. Why does he seem to avoid the obvioun next step? Surely the book has not been about individual satisfaction in a mechanized world? Or has it? (Payne 1981: 418)

From Coral Gardens and Their Magic, pp. 380-381. The anti-communist tirade does make sense in light of the fact that "Pawlicki was of special importance in the first years of Malinowski's scientific career. He was a very original man, a member of the modernistic Bohemia of Cracow and a rector of the University; [...] a philosopher who advocated positivist ideas; a professor who in 1905-6 (the last year of Malinowski's university studies) gave lectures on social policy, on the philosophy of Aristotle, on metaphysics, and on the history of modern socialism (probably the first university lecture in the world on the foundations of Marxism)." (Paluch 1981: 278); or statements like "the general features of native camp arrangements were orderliness, fixed rules, isolation of families, settled and restricted social contact, and by no means social communism and unregulated social promiscuity" in The Family Among the Australian Aborigines (Malinowski 1913: 165), and the focus on the way women disappear from open spaces when strangers approach in the Amphletts (1922: 47). On a

In an article in Man of 1930 he offered similar, more strident observations against what he regarded as the reductionist, dehumanizing effects of the "mock-algebra" of kinship. He called all of this "pseudo-mathematical," and he expressed puzzlement at the "spuriously scientific and stilted mathematization of kinship facts." To be sure, we have here another instance of Malinowski's hatred of anything whcih robbed the description of social life of its fullness and humanity. (Payne 1981: 319)

In expressions of sympathy the purported purpose of establishing a common sentiment is spurious on one side (PC 2.3). Define spurious: "not being what it purports to be; false or fake.", "(of a line of reasoning) apparently but not actually valid.", "(of offspring) illegitimate", "from Latin spurius ‘false’ + -ous. Define purport: "appear to be or do something, especially falsely." "the meaning or sense of something, typically a document or speech.", "the purpose or intention of something."

Nor, finally, will the reader find much solace from more modern experts. The leaders in social anthropology acknowledge their debt to Malinowski, but they have a great deal of difficulty pinning him down. With A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, he is one of the twin founders of modern British social anthropology. His fieldwork provided a paradigm for his students and others. Such anthropologists - among them Raymond Firth, Edmund Leach, Max Gluckman - pay proper respect to Malinowski the fieldworker, but when they try to locate his contribution to their science, they do not seem to know what to make of him. As scientists they naturally look first to his theories, which prove too simple and often self-contradictory. Ironically but predictably they expend much energy on his small corpus of ethnological theory, rather little on his monumental works of ethnography. In part they do so because, for better or worse, science is ultimately on the side of the theoretical battalions. They also do so because of Malinowski's narrative puritanism - his great prose works seem curiously divorced from what theoretical commentary he provides. [...] The problems of Malinowski's theories are well-rehearsed in Firth, ed., though rather largely defended by Symmons-Simonolewicz. As Feertz indicates, the volume which began as an attempt to resuscitate Malinowski's reputation helped seal it instead. (Payne 1981: 419)

Leach's paper "Frazer and Malinowski" is in this folder, and Firth ed. 157. Man and Culture I should have somewhere laying around. Others:

For Leach, salvation comes only through the richness of Malinowsk's data which allows the more scientific anthropologist to add structure to what the ethnographer could only describe. (Payne 1981: 420)

I agree. PC becomes much more sensible when viewed in conjunction with passages from Argonauts, and his other earlier writings. Adding structure is a different question, it's one thing to write on "The Origin of Malinowski's Phatic Communion", and another thing to justify his fourth function as a proper function of speech/language.

Out of the experience of the biological individual, he constructs a narrative of experience. In the Argonauts we follow with him the events of kula, pausing frequently for tales, myths, sociological observations. This is not a history of an event, but an obviously constructed ideal-type from various partial observations. The later works do the same for the family life-cycle and the garden-cycle. He creates a guided tour through these processes, in turn narrating, analyzing, cajoling, and mocking. (Payne 1981: 421)

It does feel like PC is one such narrated experience, primarily the experience of being gossiped about, it seems.

Here his sentiments and the natives' tend to merge. He describes the natives' views of time accordingly, dividing the world of myth when extraordinary things were ordinary from the current, more prosaic times - the Age of Gold and the Age of Iron. While Malinowski did not share the natives' belief in myth and magic, he did share their aura of wonder and regret. If deference now seems lacking, one must remember the olden days when "it was dangerous for a man who was not of high rank himself [...] to show crops which might compare too favorably with those of the chief." (Payne 1981: 424)

The dangerous consequences of ambition and vanity.

The reader of Malinowski, though, like the reader of Conrad, must be prepared to find trouble in paradise - or, more properly, the bourgeois mentality and problems dwelling even in these more remote regions. Frequently he reminds the reader that in the end, these savages are not so exotic after all - in part by showing the savage in us, more often by portraying the world of Kiriwina as not-so-different from the world of Victorian melodrama. This is especially true when Malinowsi writes about the worlds of sexual life after marriage and the every-day life of gardening and exchange. Hence, though their adolescence is spectacularly non-European, their marriages seem straight out of London. (Payne 1981: 427)

E.g. "we use language exactly as savages do" (PC 9.1). Non-Europeans straight out of London sounds like a grime band name.

In his open hostility to systems and abstract methods - already mentioned and later to be explained - Malinowski refused to allow himself as narrator or the savages as subjects to be hemmed in by any one form of analytical organization. In his preface to Raymond Firth's We, The Tikopia (1936) he railed against those like Ruth Benedict and Gregory Bateson who were dominated by theory and systems. "By contrast," he writes, "the present book is an unaffected piece of genuine scholarship, based on real experience of a culture and not a few hypostatized impressions." He then commends above all the approach which Firth used only in part - the "biographical approach" which organizes data on the coordinate of time. "Kinship," he writes, "is a process as well as a product." He commends Firth's sense of biological process, as well as his balance between full data and enlivening anecdote. (Payne 1981: 428)

What if it's Malinowski's ambition and vanity that makes him go against the grain with innovations in theory. I now realize that his shaky three-legged stool may be so shaky because he regarded the triad as another "form of analytical organization". I should one day make my way through The Ecology of Mind and then read the young anthropologist Bateson.

The thread of time provides the warp around which is woven a complex, often confusing, woof of anecdote and observation. (Payne 1981: 428)

This may be one of the prettiest sentences I've ever read.

To call Malinowski's preferred approach "biographical" may seem a bit peculiar, since Malinowski never gives us the life history of one person or the way one person worked his way through an institution. For Malinowski, the biographical approach meant keeping the individual agent squarely in the foreground. The "individual agent" is no one person; he is a type, the native actor as adventurer, lover, gardener, and so on. (Payne 1981: 428)

The "personal accounts of the speaker’s views and life history" (PC 5.4) are never explicitly given by Malinowski as ethnographic data?

Only such a schematic chart - which does no justice to the wealth of anecdotes, generalizations, criticism, and comment which Malinowski interjects - can give those who have not read the Trobriand trilogy a sense of its kaleidoscopic effect. In some ways the structure cuts against the grain of logic. To retain the thread of the narrative, he must invert what might seem like natural order: to give a clear, synoptic view of the sociology of the tribe - its rules and patterns of behavior - before talking about one of its institutions. But to keep the institution and the individual natives in focus, he must always, somewhat artificially, suspend the narrative for sociological and theoretical digressions. Yet no matter how far afield he goes, he always picks up the imaginary voyage once again, splicing together his observations into a constructed journey punctuated with anecdotes and comment. In so doing, the natives as concrete actors - building canoes, exchanging gifts, uttering spells, worrying about weather - remains in the fore. And so does the ethnographer, who is always very self-consciously orchestrating the shifts in perspective and reminding the reader who is in control. (Payne 1981: 429)

So what you're saying is that there is a linear narrative hidden underneath the clutter of theory and anecdotes? That it's an adventure story? What are the narrative "plot points" in PC? The representative anecdotes? What would happen if you "zoom into" one like Gardiner did with the couple reading books and man noticing that it's raining?

Indeed, he rarely leaves any statement, no matter how simple it might seem, without an illustration. Most curious, perhaps, is his account of famine in Coral Gardens. Having explained when and how famines occur and their natural rhythm, he feels compelled to amplify further. Hence he constructs an imaginary famine cycle in years which he calls "1914" and "1915" - though those years were, in fact, years of sufficient harvests - and leads us through in an artificially concrete ways. Then he recounts unsubstantiated native chronicle of what happened during famine in "old days" - sometimes giving up that critical perspective and merging his version with the natives'. (Payne 1981: 429)

"An artificially concrete way" is oddly exact.

The self presented in the Trobriand trilogy is thus problematic and disquieting. The authorial narrator certainly does not appear troubled at any given moment. Yet the language and the sequence of the events has left many readers puzzled and annoyed. Clifford Geertz summarizes well the harshest judgment of Malinowski's students and fellow-anthropologists:
Pretentious, platitudinous, unsystematic, simple-minded, long-winded, intellectually provincial, and somehow even somewhat dishonest, he had, somehow, a way with the natives.
(Payne 1981: 430)

Psychological symptoms.

It is the magic of her body that still fills me, and the poetry of her presence. (Payne 1981: 432)

Her body language is in cursive.

Twinges of conscience result from lack of integrated feelings and truth in relation to individuals. My whole ethics is based on the fundamental instinct of unified personality. From this follows the need to be the same in different situations (truth in relation to oneself) and the need, indispensability, of sincerely: the whole value of friendship is based on the possibility of expressing [|] oneself, of being oneself with absolutely frankness. Alternative between a lie and spoiling a relationship. (My attitude to Mother, Staś, and all my friends was strained.) - Love does not flow from ethics, but ethics from love. (Malinowski 1967: 296-297; in Payne 1981: 433-434)

Unexpectedly a crucial piece to the puzzle of "insincerity" the of expressions of sympathy.

He will insist that theories create facts, yet he will consistently, puritanically refuse to take the step from fact to theory, from narrative to functional analysis, in his works. He will insist that social organization has primacy in the mapping of any institution, yet he will always make sociology an aside or a late appendage. He will describe a functionalism based on a hierarchy of needs - biological, instrumental, integrative - yet he will never use this natural procedure to describe any particular event or institution. (Payne 1981: 436)

In PC the sociological stuff is hidden in phraseology and a footnote.

Like most of us, Malinowski saw what he wanted and needed to see. When Edmund Leach spoke of Malinowski's "obsessional empiricism," he is probably more right than he realized. (Payne 1981: 437)

I'd say that his revolt against collective consciousness, which he accepts only in parts, is based on empirical obsession.

Passion, one must also hasted to add, also reveals. More important, this habitual suspicion of human motives - bordering on paranoia - made him view the world of human action with particular scrutiny. If, as Adam Kuper says, Malinowski's science rests on a keen awareness of the gap between thinking, saying, and doing, we are hard-pressed to tell whether that science emerged from objective insight or personal distrust of the world. [...] For his inherent suspiciousness, see e.g., Diary, p. 30. Paranoia and extreme perceptiveness vis à vis objects often go hand-in-hand. (Payne 1981: 438)

Suspicion of sincerity (expressions of sympathy?); the gap between the legs of the peripatetic triad? Personal distrust of the world sounds like Conrad's life as a hazardous enterprise (infra, above).

The "bloody niggers" of the diary are the objects of projection - he accuses them of all the things he will say of himself; paranoia - he was habitually convinced of conspiracies around him; self-chastisement - he may well have been sexually drawn to them and hates them by reaction. These were his informants. (Payne 1981: 438)

This seems indeed to be related to his fear of "gossip".

Since everything adheres to everything, one can wander without ever getting fully disconnected. Far from giving a logical structure, his functionalism gave license to meander rather freely over a range of associations, a crucial opportunity for a person of inevitably fragmenting themes. (Payne 1981: 438)

Reminiscent of Jespersen's "Mean not, but blunder round about a meaning" (1922: 274).

Hempel (1959) insists that functional theory can only be heuristic; it raises important issues of interconnection but, as causal explanation, remains solipsistic. Gluckman (1963), pp. 237-239, argues the case well for Malinowski - using Malinowski's own words. In the Diary, Malinowski blithely talks about adding "general theoretical sauce" to his observations - hardly a noble or controlling role for theory. May we not see Malinowski's theories as explanations of his narratives, rather than his narratives as illustrations of his theories? In other words, secondary elaborations, not guiding principles? (Payne 1981: 438; footnote 123)

This Carl Hempel fella seems to know his stuff: "The Logic of Functional Analysis" in Liewellyn Gross, Symposium on Sociological Theory, pp. 271-307. As to illustrations or representative anecdates, in PC it's a heavy task to differentiate between secondary elaborations and guiding principles; they seemed to be mixed in modern use.

Darnell, Regna 1977. History of Anthropology in Historical Perspective. Annual Review of Anthropology 6: 399-417.

The required course is frequently taught by the eldest member of the department, who is presumably qualified to teach the history because he has lived through more of it than anyone else. At best such a course provides the fledgling anthropologist with a collection of anecdotes, later to prove useful in socializing his own students within the profession. At worst such a course convinces the student that there is no intelligent reason to consider research done more than a decade previously. (Darnell 1977: 399)

On the topic of formulae - anecdotes (shared memories) are a means of socialization.

The first issue of the Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences in 1965 posed the issue clearly with reference to anthropology. Stocking drew a dichotomy between historicism as understood by historians and presentism, the use of history to justify or rationalize present-day concerns. (Darnell 1977: 400)

Nead terminological finding.

Hallowell wrote in the same 1964 volume of JHBS about the history of anthropology as an anthropological problem. There he argued that anthropologists writing their disciplinary history legitimately used the same standards of scholarship which they applied to their fieldwork among "primitive" people. (Darnell 1977: 400)

Tempted I am to write on the origin of phatic communion in Malinowski's narrative style.

There is, of course, a historical dimension to any topic within the broadly defined discipline of anthropology. And it is unquestionable that the scope of anthropology is difficult to unify. To collect a bibliography or peripherally historical articles and books would, therefore, be an impossible taks. (Darnell 1977: 400)

Exactly my point with the origin of phatic communion. The bibliographical remark reminded me of a video titled "Computable Knowledge Project with Andrew McCallum of UMass Amherst" - they're going to start using AI to read through scientific papers.

The next Boasian effort was prepared by a member of the core group of American anthropologists. Lowie discussed the intellectual roots of the discipline from his own point of view, with an unsurprising stress on early German sources. His treatment ended with the Boasian school and some effort at prognosis for the future. The book is informative but unexciting, in spite of Lowie's participation in the tradition he describes. (Darnell 1977: 401)

I'm interested in those early German influences. This is his 1937. The History of Ethnological Theory (New York: Rinehart).

Slotkin's major collection of readings in the intellectual background of anthropology appeared in 1965. The editor was an anthropologist whose commentaries on his own wide reading in history, philosophy, and classics helped many anthropologists to expand their notions of the scope of the history of the discipline. Moreover, Slotkin provided a certain amount of basic commentary which at least began the task of tying together the immense range of material covered. (Darnell 1977: 402)

Phraseology for discussing the expanding or broadening of PC tropes with passages of Malinowski's own publications and those of his influences; and interested in the book, 1965. Readings in Early Anthropology (Viking Fund Publ.).

Stocking's book, republished a number of previous essays and presenting considerable new material as well, deals with three concepts - race, evolution, and culture - as they changed through time. He begins with Tylor, although most of the papers deal with aspects of the American Boasian tradition. The emphasis is on the context of ideas at the time they were propounded. (Darnell 1977: 402)

This is his 1968. Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York: Basic Books).

The first section takes the view that anthropology, broadly conceived as the study of man, is not unique to the anthropological tradition which developed in the western world. First, there is some kind of anthropological folk knowledge in every human culture. Moreover, such knowledge has been formalized at least by the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Chinese (not represented), as well as during the European Renaissance. The anthropological method of cross-cultural comparison is applied to defining the discipline itself. (Darnell 1977: 405)

Find a connection between ethnographic field-work, the stranger, and national character.

Honigmann suggests that the ideas of anthropology have developed more by substitution than by cumulation (Kuhn's point is that scientific development proceeds in cycles or paradigms, not in straight lines). Anthropological ideas are divided into orienting concepts which specify subjects of inquiry, theories which are compounded out of orienting concepts, and methodological propositions which are comparable to theories. The very abstract and deterministic notion of theory propounded by Harris is implicitly rejected. Honigmann notes that ideas are always applied from a point of view and identifies eight in anthropology: historical, developmental, integrational, instrumental, configurational, biological, psychological, and geographical. (Darnell 1977: 408)

Imagine if that were the case that would mean that every few decades PC would completely refresh its content, oh lawd that's happening isn't it. It has orienting concepts but theories are not compounded and methodology is not to be found.

Material comparable to that on Boas's early fieldwork is provided by the publication of Malinowski's field diaries from the Trobriand Islands. In both cases, the current standards of fieldwork with which the two men are so intimately associated in the history of the discipline simply do not apply. (Darnell 1977: 412)

That is a burn.

Gellner, Ernest 1985. Malinowski Go Home: Reflections on the Malinowski Centenary Conferences. Anthropology Today 1(5): 5-7.

Hithero, the appearance of Malinowski on the London scene, and his rapid conversion of the British Empire, destined to become, in its last three or four decades, the reserve laboratory for the members of his seminar, was seen as a kind of parthenogenesis. His central intuitions about the nature of social life and the correct method for studying it were luminously convincing, and amply justified by their rich fruit. Their validity (not quite all of them, but taking it in the round) was sufficient to explain both their emergence and their appeal. (Gellner 1985: 5)

The "intuitive" issue with terminological diffusion.

The merits of the anthropological style he initiated or fathered are what they are; they are not affected, one way or the other, by the discovery and documentation of its intellectual origins. The role which Malinowski's ideas played in reorganizing social anthropology, in turning it, in effect, into a new kind of autonomous subject, is well known. (Gellner 1985: 5)

A counter-argument towards any attempts to elucidate the origins of Malinowski's ideas. (SymmonSK)

[...] in the face of issues which no inhabitant of central or Eastern Europe could ignore, and they were worked out with the help of conceptual tools drawn from the very core of the European philosophic debate. There is of course no incompatibility in this double employment of the same ideas, quite the reverse. (Gellner 1985: 5)

Phraseology for Spencer and Durkheim; and for the shaky three legs of the stool.

No doubt he had been a Pole before he was an anthropologist, but we do know from his own affirmation that a depressed and very young Malinowski turned to Frazer for solace, rather as a depressed J.S. Mill had once turned to Wordsworth... The relevance of his ideas to the state of Europe can only be reconstructed from parts of his oeuvre that are much less central to it. But, thanks to the researches of Andrzej Paluch, Andrzej Flis, Jan Jerschina, Grazyna Kubica, Edwin Ardener, Robert Thorton and others, we are now very much clearer about the intellectual tools he brought to the task. Malinowski's doctoral dissertation, on 'The Principle of Economy of Thought', received sub auspiciis Imperatoris in 1908, is no doubt the most important single document concerning this topic. (Gellner 1985: 6)

What is he hinting here?

The central political idea of nationalism is that the state is legitimate if and only if it expresses and protects a supposedly pre-existent cultural unity. The ethnographic reality of most of Europe was so complex that this principle could not yield unambiguous answers. The plurality of dialects, of vertical as well as lateral (territorial) cultural differences, of ethnic specializations, migrations and so forth, ensured that there was ample room for dispute. (Gellner 1985: 6)

Huh, useful. For defining "national character" primarily, but also in Estonian cultural matters.

But of course, it was not only the ethnographers who had nationalist arrière pensées. The historians were even more prominent in this game. The crucial Russian mediaeval epic, demonstrating the deep cultural roots of the Slavs in what is now the Ukraine, was conventiently rediscovered at the very moment when the Russians were finally recovering the lands around the Black Sea from Turks and Tatars. The authenticity of the work has some doubt attaching to it to this day: it is interesting that Soviet historical orthodoxy, whose instincts are nationalist at least as much as Marxist, is firmly on the side of their genuineness. The Czechs, less fortunate, had the fraudulence of their own mediaeval epic firmly demonstrated and publicized by T.G. Masaryk, later to set up a re-born Czech state without the benefit of this historical fiction. (Gellner 1985: 6)

All too familiar. Could interest Andreas Ventsel.

The indigenous and German peasants and craftsmen had got on famously, it seems, until imperialist German barons had messed it all up. The author had some trouble in squaring a nationalist distaste for aliens barons with a Marxist recognition that feudalism is, after all, an advance on tribalism and a precondition of further progress. If we must have barons, let us at least have our own, he seemed to say. The Estonians and Latvians, who had no barons of their own, envy the Lithuanians who did, and who consequently resisted the Teutonic ones (though they eventually succumbed to Polish cultural ascendancy). I have heard an Estonian say, 'if only the German feudals had arrived 50 years later, we might have had our own feudalism and thrust them back'. (Gellner 1985: 6)

Haha, what?

But an even more extreme possibility is also available. Why not damn them all, and do without this doubt-ridden, manipulation-prone realm altogether? Such was, in simplest, crudest terms, Malinowski's reaction. It turns the tables on the manipulators: the fact that they use the past for current aims is the very essence of the past. Instead of arbitrating between rival claims about the past, explain the present by the functions which the 'past' (and anything else) fulfils right now. (Gellner 1985: 7)

The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon: this is presentism.

We know full well why Malinowski the anthropologist was drawn to this view: it cut the ground from under speculative (and fragment-based) reconstruction. It is the very basis of his methodological revolution. (Gellner 1985: 7)

When you cut speculative and fragment-based reconstruction, aren't you simultaneously cutting the "synchronic functionalist interpretation of the findings" (infra, 5)?

Evans-Pritchard told me that he firmly turned down the suggestion that he should rename himself McRaspberry - malina being the common Slavonic root meaning raspberry. (Gellner 1985: 7)

Malinowski on vaarikapoiss.

Where did he get the ideas which enabled him to formulate an alternative, usable both in anthrpology and in politics? Here the worth of Andrzej Flis and others on his doctoral dissertation provides the conclusive answer. The thesis was concerned with Ernst Mach (also with Avenarius) and the 'second positivism'. One of its central themes was the radical empiricist aspiration (which reached anglophone philosophy mainly through Bertrand Russell) to eschew the invocation of transcendent objects; terms which seemed to refer to such objects were, whenever possible, to be construed as referring indirectly to observable entities. Malinowsk's attitude to the past constitutes a brilliant deployment of this idea: the alleged past is a 'charter' of current practices, its essence is the function it observably performs now. (Gellner 1985: 7)

According to Paluch (above, 278) "The teachers of Malinowski [...] All of them were adherents to the 'second positivism' of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius". "To eschew the invocation of transcendent objects" is exactly what Malinowski is duing in his trikes against collective consciousness.

But another theme is just as prominent in Machian positivism: its biological interpretation of knowledge. It sees ideas as serving a total organism, and as vindicated by constituting the most 'economical' way of serving the organism's needs. This notion was reflected in the very title of Malinowski's dissertation. This leads, in a very natural way, to Malinowski's functionalism, and to his holistic attitude to culture. (Gellner 1985: 7)

Well, "Ideas, if attainable at all, are the result of long and toilsome search on the part of philosophers" (Gardiner 1932: 44).

Inter-war Poland was nationalist, romantic and historicist in its dominant mood. Why should it be attracted by a London professor, even though he be Anthropologist Laureate to the British Empire, who taught that it wsa of the very essence of the past that it was manipulated in the interests of current aspirations? And, as Szacki points out, intellectuals trying to piece together a coherent national culture, from decaying fragments of a peasant custom disconnected from the great tradition of the society, would hardly find illumination in a thinker who taught that cultures were in fact functionally integrated. (Gellner 1985: 7)

This is in my opinion the greatest self-inconsistency: demean the social mind for a later re-hashing it in the guise of culture.

Thornton, Robert J. 1985. 'Imagine Yourself Set Down...': Mach, Frazer, Conrad, Malinowski and the Role of Imagination in Ethnography. Anthropology Today 1(5): 7-14.

In fact I found that the more scenery and 'atmosphere' was given in the account, which you had at your disposal, the more convincing and manageable to the imagination was the ethnology of that district. I shall try to give the local colour and describe the nature of the scenery and mise-en-scene to the best of my ability. (Malinowski, Correspondence 25/10/1917, cited as "corresp.' hereafter. Letter to J.G. Frazer. Emphasis is mine).
The importance of Frazer's writing to Malinowski, however, goes beyond the methodological question of what data to collect and how to collect and present it. (Thornton 1985: 8)

If "scenery" were taken as a serious synonym for "atmosphere", it woud yield a wholly different aspect to the matter of collective consciousness and social life.

If the details of native life were 'imponderabilia', it is because they could only be constructed in the readers' imagination once the moment of experience was past. (Thornton 1985: 8)

Another reason for taking up Malinowski's own narrative style and turning it towards PC.

Of the authors he read during this period those of most significant to him, to judge from his own writings at the time, included Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius, Wilhelm Fechner, and Wilhelm Wundt. Their ideas about the positive, psycho-physical basis for 'imagination' as a fundamental characteristic of human cognition, indicate that [|] Malinowski's idea of the role of imagination in his reading of Frazer's Golden Bough, and in his own ethnographic writing, were founded on a positivistic conception of the real physiological existence of images and constructs in the mind that permitted the apprehension of reality to take place. (Thornton 1985: 8-9)

This supposition might complicate the topic of communicating ideas and "presentation" (in the mind, of mental images).

Malinowski's reading of Frazer provided the content for what he saw as a new empirical science of the primitive consciousness that would lead to the deeper understanding of all human nature. (Thornton 1985: 9)

And yet on the matter of "the bedrock aspects of man's nature in society" he proceeds with hypothesis only.

That is, if a firm like Macmillan's takes it and if some publicity is given to it in the press. This latter goes very much against the grain, of course, but [rightly or wrongly], I believe in the value of my stuff, [and] naturally, would like to see it read... Moreover, I am now very much in need of becoming known, and even if possible of earning a few pounds. (Correspondence, Malinowski to Frazer 10 Feb. 1921)
Malinowski noted that he had already written to several publishers, George Macmillan included, and asked Frazer to write in support. (Thornton 1985: 11)

I would not be surprised if his supplement to Ogden & Richards' The Meaning of Meaning was a composition of left-overs.

In this preface, Frazer paid special attention to the fieldwork of the author, especially since he saw in Malinowski's treatment of economy a proof of his own 'theories' of the role of magic, imagination and emotion in what 'at first sight might seem a purely economic activity' (Frazer in Malinowski 1961[1922]: x). (Thornton 1985: 11)

Huh. What is Frazer's theory of emotion?

Rigged out in the cast-off garments of Mr. Jeremy Bentham and Mr. Gradgrind, this horrible phantom is apparently actuated by no other motive than that of filthy lucre, which he pursues relentlessly, on Spencerian principles... (Frazer 1922: xi; in Thornton 1985: 11)

This is what happens when you skip the preface to Argonauts!

We do not know when Malinowski may have first discovered Joseph Conrad's writing, but he chose several volumes of Conrad's stories and novels to take into the field with him. His reactions to them are recorded many times in A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1967). Some examples from these 'reading notes' allow us to assess the impact on Conrad against the background of other works. (Thornton 1985: 11)

At some point Conrad's novels might merit a closer, "Malinowskian", reading. Particularly Romance, which is noted second time here (in these current readings).

About a month later his patience was close to an end, and he noted on the 21st of January that he
went to the village hoping to photograph a few stages of bara I handed out half-sticks of tobacco, then watched a few dances; [...] At moments I was furious with them, particularly because after I gave them their portions of tobacco they all went away. On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to 'Exterminate the brutes'.
Malinowski's words have shocked many readers of his Diary (1967), but they are a direct quotation from Conrad's Heart of Darkness. (Thornton 1985: 12)

An instance of natives being deceptive or at the very least less than courteous.

The past was dark because it was only partially known, like the interior of Africa. With this epistemological 'darkness' went the physical images of dark skins, and dark foliage of the forests and swamps, and the emotional darkness of uncontrollable passion, and dark rages. Marlowe, the narrator in Heart of Darkness, is made to refer as much to the darkness of London as to the darkness of Africa, for the images ar closely linked. (Thornton 1985: 12)

Phraseology for checking emotions and the "dark continent" (or whatever it was).

The imagination 'fills in' the lacunae of both experience and description. It is this imaginative potential that allows the reader to connect the words and phrases of the text itself to the more general images which it evokes. (Thornton 1985: 13)

Relevant for the intuitive or illustrated definition of PC.

Lee, Dorothy Demetracopolous 1940. A Primitive System of Values. Philosophy of Science 7(3): 355-378.

This essay is based entirely on his writings. It does not add any material to what Professor Malinowski has presented. It tries, rather, to formulate what is not explicitly stated; - the logical and ethical implications of the customary behavior of the Trobrianders. If at times I venture to disagree with Professor Malinowski's own deductions, it is only because, in presenting the material with such a wealth of pertinent detail and emotional association, he has made it possible for his readers to draw conclusions as valid as his own. (Lee 1940: 355)

I cannot do that for two reasons, one being that I haven't yet even read the trilogy, not to mention his lesser known books, and secondly I have all this earlier material from his contemporaries to deal with.

Our study will be an inquiry into the problems of value and standards of evaluation; it will investigate motive, activity and result. This involves a prior examination fo questions of logical relationship (Lee 1940: 356)

This person logics.

It is inevitable that in a study of this kind I should run the risk of being blinded by the prejudices inherent in my own culture and system of thought. To minimize this danger, I have read intensively, every year for the last four years, Malinowski's two most complete books on the Trobriand social life, trying to steep myself in the Trobriand way of thinking. (Lee 1940: 356)

A mark of obsession with Malinowski, noted somewhere above.

An analysis of Trobriand behavior and language shows that the Trobriander, by custom, focuses his interest on the thing or act in itself, not on its relationship. His world appears to be a mosaic composed of elements which are self-contained as well as disparate. He himself remains apart, likewise, and refrains from passing judgement on this world. Unlike the more subjective European languages, his speech rarely contains comparisons; he offers no motive for acts, he deduces no causal connection from [|] a sequence, he does not justify activity in terms extraneous to itself. (Lee 1940: 356-357)

This is a good summary of the reflexive aspect of various actions (be it gardening work, social intercourse, or whatever else), i.e. the formulation of self-contained things for-the-sake-of themselves. Could it actually be a synonym for the inability to formulate causal connections?

The texts which Malinowski has published contains no word such as because, no expressions such as so as to, to this end. Malinowski, constrained by the pattern of English speech, uses because, cause and reason in translation. But that which he renders as because is merely for in the Trobriand language. The word which he translates as cause or reason means the lowest part of the trunk. Now a trunk is that which precedes the branches, spatially and temporally, and from which the branches take rise; but we can hardly maintain that the trunk is the cause of the branches, or the reason for the branches. (Lee 1940: 357)

Whence the "raison d'être," then?

Again, the Trobriander cannot comprehend the White Man's proclivity to drink so as to get drunk; nor the White Man's conception of food as nourishment, as a means toward the maintenance of life; to the Trobriander eating is merely a peasant activity. (Lee 1940: 359)

Big if true: this would have profound implications for the pleasure principle in PC.

It is the modal or aspectual, not the temporal, phase of the event, I believe, which is really brought forward. Potentiality, achievement, completion, definiteness, emphasis are indicated at most; and the event remains self-constrained and essentially unrelated. (Lee 1940: 360)

Verbiage for discussing consummation.

The absence of devices for the expression of causality and the means-and-end relationship is not an isolated fact in the Trobriander language. (Lee 1940: 361)

A concise statement of the issues that might have lead to so many reflexive interpretations on Malinowski's part.

Obviously, if such were the case, I should be forced to hold that they have no language, since all words are, at base, attributive and classificatory. But I want to make the point that the name which the Trobrianders give to an object applies directly to the nature of the thing, and only incidentally to its attributes. The Trobriander does not analyse the nature of things, to dissolve it into attributes or relationships; he does not direct his interest toward transcending the object in any way whatever. (Lee 1940: 362)

This is, in general, not very much different from the biased statements about primitive man being no great metaphysician. The interesting particular question would be if Malinowski's own obsession with radical empiricism, or his social relations with the islanders, didn't bar him from the higher achievements of art and literature of the natives. He mentions women's songs only once, if I recall. Perhaps mythology and magical lore is not the only symbolic activity in those parts and Malinowski simply didn't find or wasn't interested in it? The nagging suspicion that perhaps Malinowski simply didn't know the language well enough or apropriate manners or accessing those quarters of the natives' culture.

Goodness, I believe, is a component of the vaygu'a, a certain class of objects which are of no utility but of supreme value. Whenever a malignant spirit, in the shape of a snake or land-crab, is found near or in the village, such vaygu'a are put before it, not as a peace offering, but to impart to the spirit some of the goodness contained within them and so make it benevolent. (Lee 1940: 362)

Now this a new aspect. This morning I caught myself wondering about the word "propitiation", which comes straing from Latin and means "an atonement", or "to appease", and "make favourable" or "gracious" or "kind" (consider relation with Giddings' "consciousness of kind"). In the blog Gipsy Scholar it is brought out that the King James Bible verse reads "mercy seat" and the New International Version as "cover", where the latter could accord with "cover cost". The Blue Letter Bible's Lexicon Results gives the following lexical set: purge, make reconciliation, cover over ro coat with pitch (tõrvaga kaetud - kas nagu "kokku lepitud" või "ära unustatud"?), pacify (think "natural enemy" in PC), The comments in that blog even put forth (purport?) the following biblical passage:

In Romans 4:5-8; Paul, referring to Psalm 31:1,2, states (KJV):But to him that worketh not but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness, Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works, Saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.

If one "reads into" this usage, propitiation in the social interaction sense meant by John Laver amount to something like Giddings' consciousness of kind but somewhere in the religious and social phenomena of ostracizing sinners. Or, in magical contexts, "cursed", or in social and stigmatization, "crazy", etc.

This magic takes away people's appetites, or makes them develop an abnormal yearning for the uncultivated products of the bush; while the gift yams are "anchored" to the yam house, and rot unconsumed through the year. At every opportunity, both the vaygu'a and the gift yams are handled and otherwise touched, giving pleasure and satisfaction through their goodness. (Lee 1940: 363)

What is this now? This seems reasonable and maybe hinted in some undertones in Argonauts but Malinowski mostly describes how the vaygu'a are coveted and spoken about (these purportedly crude jewellery items even have names) but I didn't notice handling and touching; in actual offerings they are frequently thrown at the partner's feet or general vicinity dramatically as if it were trash and some child or woman in the tribe's family comes and picks it up at some point. (Now dreaming of writing a sci-fi short story with an artificial kula and the jewellery is actually worn by women during courting and festivities, and just traded by men; almost like wedding rings that you can exchange). // A few pages later: "Full ninety percent of the armshells are too small to be worn even by children; some are too valuable to be worn; the necklaces are too cumbersome to be worn except very rarely, and then it is not the possessors but their relatives who wear them" (ibid, 370; e.a.).

Obviously, the phrase, though so similar to the one given above, cannot, like that phrase, be translated in terms of our grammatical comparative. (Lee 1940: 364)

Termini technici: phraseological alternatives in source texts.

We discover, then, in the Trobriander language, a sentence composed of essentially disparate and unrelated words. We find that, in his speech, the Trobriander rarely compares, does not express causality or the telic relationship, feels no conventional urge to go beyond the fact into its implications or relationships. In the following section we shall see the ethical counterpart of this logical attitude in the active life of the Trobrianders. (Lee 1940: 365)

And Malinowski's narrative writing style is the ethnographic counterpart of this logical attitude?

The interests and activities of the Trobrianders center predominantly around the exchange of gifts. By gift I mean anything unsolicited and freely given; not only objects, but services also. Trobriand life runs in a pattern of reciprocal duties and privileges, to use current Anthropological terminology. This does not mean that a man spends all his time giving gifts. (Lee 1940: 365)

Recall the old saying "Hello costs nothing". Formulae of greeting and approach are ideally unsolicited and freely given but is actually set in a pattern of reciprocal duties and privileges set up by mutual acquaintance and confiding, as well as other social factors like rank or status in the social hierarchy, etc. In some cases greeting and approach actually are close to obligation and duty.

The essence of the gift is that it should be freely given, with no teleologial motivation. It is significant that words which mean "to give freely" in English, have emotive association [|] foreign to the Trobriander concept. They either imply gracious condescension, as in bestow, or giving to an institution or cause as donate and endow. I am forced, therefore, to use for the Trobriander concept the word give, which, though not limited to free giving in meaning, has the merit of being free from extraneous connotation. This, and the word receive, I shall italicize, when I use them with reference to free giving. (Lee 1940: 366)

This paper continues to astound. This is about the "free" in "free, aimless, social intercourse". Freedom from "extraneous connotations" can be read as the explanation for the cryptic "The whole situation consists in what happens linguistically" (PC 7.7). The footnote reads "Here I discuss only the ethical aspect of the Good. Its social and emotional aspects will be the subject of another study." - which must be "Codifications of Reality: Lineal and Non-Lineal" (1950).

There are few and meagre instances of exchange outside the gift-giving pattern, which might be thought of as calculated and [|]resultative in intent. Otherwise, we find disparate acts of giving, arising from nothing and leading to nothing. Th true gift is futile in essence. (Lee 1940: 366-367)

What I regularly call "consummation" after Leon Festinger and John Dewey is better phrased in terms of Giddings' pseudo-sociality or Haverkate's pseudo-communion, which I intend to criticize in Elyachar's phatic labour because it is exactly, as Lee puts it, "calculated and resultative in intent" and not, say, desiderously futile. Giddings' discussion of utility and pleasure (as well as that in Aristotle) can serve here as backing.

Again I am forced to use a word which is highly colored through cultural association. I use futile to refer to an act which is neither causative nor telic, whose significance does not transcend the act itself. We who give sanction only to acts which are a means to an end use the word futile to refer to that which has failed to be a means to a desired end. In spite of its emotive coloring, however, I use the word futile in preference to non-utile or non-telic, because these words, in denying, essentially assert something which the Trobrianders do not recognize culturally. (Lee 1940: 367)

Again I can't put into words how much I'm enjoying this paper. Non-utility (positive futility) is the reason for one of the shaky stool-legs: "unconnected with what they are doing" (PC 1.2). I usually call this aspect by reflexivity (and, earlier, functional autonomy, after Jakobson).

The activity, then, which is most highly sanctioned among the Trobrianders, is futile giving. If I seem to set this in contrast to our activities, it is not that I consider it absent from our culture. Our streets are lined with Gift Shoppes, our silversmiths thrive on weddings, our greatest buying activity comes at Christmastime, our florists invented Mother's Day. But we, conventionally and to some extent actually, like to give gifts not because we enjoy to select or to make, not because we feel a personal enhancement in giving, but "to give pleasure," i.e., as a means to an end. The Trobrianders give because they enjoy giving. (Lee 1940: 367)

Another novel aspect to "social pleasure and self-enhancement" (PC 5.5).

Actually, the gift yams are largely consumed, but, ideally, only after they have been redistributed to various people outside the household, who stand in a relationship of exchange of gifts or services. (Lee 1940: 368)

Phraseology for the debt of magical lore on how to manipulate the British colonial system owed by Malinowski to the chiefs (cf. Wax, above).

Malinowski speaks of "obligation" to give these gifts. This is not an obligation which comes through the authority of law or fear of punishment, but rather a personal urge to fill a culturally assigned part. It is a type of "obligation" common in our culture, but unformulated. It is what we mean when we [|] say, "We must have the Lawsons to dinner." We shall do our best to prepare the dinner, going to trouble and expense, and we shall enjoy giving it much or little; even as the Lawsons will, or will not, enjoy being given the dinner. The pleasure we get in giving it comes primarily not from the thought of a favorable public opinion, but rather from a feeling of personal enhancement. It is the type of "obligation", furthermore, which a wife has to keep house for her husband and mend his socks. (Lee 1940: 368-369)

It is possible that there was indeed a clash of cultures in how Malinowski gathered information from his informants; that perhaps he simply misunderstood the native manners and assumed that tobacco is a payment for conversation while the natives saw it differently. In other words, perhaps he couldn't maneuver in social relations as well as he could in the British Empire.

In a society such as that of the Trobrianders, extraneous inducements to good conduct are naturally absent. We find no use of punishment, for example, in the bringing up of children. If a little boy tries to fondle his sister - thus infringing upon the [|] supreme taboo - the adults around him will appear so horrified, that the situation in itself will be frought with unpleasant emotion and become undesirable; whereas we, under similar circumstances, would try to give unpleasant extrinsic associations to the situation. If a man shirks his obligations, the shirking is its own punishment; because a man has failed to use an opportunity to enhance himself through achieving the good. Eventually, if he continues shirking, he will automatically drop out of the scheme of giving and receiving, and thus lose status; but this is not punishment, but rather to obverse of his shirking, an inseparable aspect of his conduct. This is on a par with what happens in our society when a matron fails to return calls or to give return entertainments; when she subsequently drops out of the social life of the community, it is no deliberate punishment imposed from the outside. (Lee 1940: 372-373)

This took a very dark turn but the argument is poignant for "the stranger", and the "unpleasant tension". The mention of status is a reminder that every Trobriand man intuitively knows his "rank" and primarily kula-s with those on the same rank in other districts (this is the hierarchical system, as someone above reported, Malinowski idealized, and British influence helped erode). The failure to return calls reminds me of Jakobson's telephony illustrations and an entry in Malinowski's diary about dinner plans with the Gardiners.

The value of an act, then, lies within that act. The standard of evaluation, furthermore, is not different from the intrinsic value of the act, and does not lie beyond the individual act or actor; i.e. it is not comparative. The concept of being good with a view to being "as good as" or "better than" one's neighbor is absent from the Trobriand system of thought. (Lee 1940: 373)

The first highlight is golden for reflexivity or futility (the situation being completely linguistic). With the second I disagree, on account of the rank system in kula just mentioned, and the fact that the values of armshells vary. This account seems all too idealistic.

At this point I walk on dangerous ground, as I am in disagreement with Malinowski, [|] who believes that the Trobriander takes pride in vying with his neighbor. Malinowski speaks often of the Trobriander's love of boasting and of display as something which would be necessarily motivated by a competitive spirit. Yet when he quotes examples of boastful speech, they show no such spirit. "My renown is (like) thunder; my steps are (like) earthquake", says the Trobriander, in a magical spell. "I anchor at the Lagoon, my renown reaches the open sea." (Lee 1940: 373-374)

Vanity. That's what I think Malinowski understands as "social". On the very second page of Argonauts Malinowski writes: "ideas, ambitions, desires and vanities are very much bound up with the Kula". It's perfectly possible that ambition, vanity, and gossip were treated in a chapter of the book that Malinowski chose to leave out; even in Jespersen's book about language there's a chapter of few that could have been left out (do I want to read Havelock Ellis?).

Again, I believe, this is the type of activity which has been interpreted as competitive display; that is, a review of achievement, at best simultaneously exhibited. (Lee 1940: 374)

Cf. "personal accounts of the speaker's views and life history" (PC 5.4). The Dale Carnegie type.

The giving of food is always public; but the consumption of food is not good, perhaps even bad. When there are different groups of people to whom the food is to be distributed, a heap is often given to each group-leader. This is done publicly and ceremonially. But when the leader redistributes it, acting merely as an agent and not truly giving, he does it privately and casually. (Lee 1940: 375)

Hierarchy. Who was Malinowski's group-leader?

Praise is public, censorship must be private; more explicitly, the description of good conduct is public, that of bad conduct must be private. But if a man is taxed descriptively with bad conduct, whether this taxing be true or not, the man so taxed must commit suicide. (Lee 1940: 376)

What if "the stranger" is a metaphor for a man taxed to commit suicide? What if you are so taxed and not given food, for example? Or what if your bad conduct accrues some witch trying to throw poison herbs into your indoor fireplace?

It is not a feeling of unbearable guilt, nor is it the knowledge of adverse public opinion which forces these people to commit suicide. It is when conduct which should be private is made public that suicide follows. So a man will commit suicide if someone says to him, "Copulate with [|] thy wife." The factor in a public "accusation" which drives to suicide is not the disparagement but the mere public statement of fact; as for example, "You like carnal pleasures." It is the making public of essentially private conduct which is the supremely bad. (Lee 1940: 377)

Perhaps this is the deeper meaning of "gossip", and "the tone of conversational and social life around the village fires, the existence of strong friendships or hostilities, and of passing sympathies and dislikes" (Malinowski 1922: 18-19) in conjunction with the "tone of jocular familiarity" with which "an interesting stranger" is greeted (ibid, 52). Gossip has negative connotations, and the manner of talk described in the latter passage is "uncomplimentary".

Excellence in any undertaking is bad. Too great a success in love, is bad conduct. One must not be too good a dancer, too successful in love magic or beauty magic. A commoner may not have too many kula partners, nor too much success in the kula. His garden must not be too beautiful, his harvest too rich. All these are bad. A man who excelled in such ways would be put to death by the chief's sorcerers, because he had presumed. (Lee 1940: 377)

Communism! For a moment there I thought I was reading Arvo Valton's Depression and Hope (1989) about Estonians sent to live in Western Siberia because of being too successful in their business and household, and these people needed to go away for the building of communism.

To conclude: We find in Trobriand ethics, applied in activity, the logical concepts which are implicit in the Trobriand language. We find that causes and consequences play no part in evaluation. We find that an act or an object is an end, and a reason, unto itself; and that the standard of its evaluation lies within it. We find that telic motivation is of no social value, but that supreme value lies in the act which is utterly futile and disparate, enclosing within itself its own beginning and its own end. (Lee 1940: 378)

This is definitely among the best papers in this thread/file. It is both clear and engaging. Those years of reading the same texts paid off. Now let's see the follow-up.

Lee, Dorothy Demetracopolous 1950. Lineal and Nonlineal Codifications of Reality. Psychosomatic Medicine 12(2): 89-97.

Basic to my investigation is the assumption that a member of a given society not only codifies experienced reality through the use of the specific language and other patterned behavior characteristic of his culture, but that he actually grasps reality only as it is presented to him in this code. The assumption is not that reality itself is relative; rather, that it is differently punctuated and categorized, or that different aspects of it are noticed by, or presented to the participants of different cultures. (Lee 1950: 89)

For a moment there I thought I was reading someone else, but the footnote explains that "I have taken over this special use o the terms codification and punctuation from Gregory Bateson."

The Ontong Javanese name according to their everyday behavior and experience, not according to formal definition. A man shares the ordinary details of his living with his brothers and their wives for a large part of the year; he sleeps in the same large room, he eats with them, he jokes and warks around the house with them; the rest of the year he spends with his wife's sisters and their husbands, in the same easy companionship. (Lee 1950: 90)

Compared to "easy companionship" Malinowski's "pleasant atmosphere of polite, social intercourse" is a bit of an awkward stretch.

The ave relationship also carries special obligations toward a female ave and her children. Kainga means a relationship of ease, full of shared living, of informality, gaiety; ave names one of formality, prohibition, strain. (Lee 1950: 90)

Lexical findings for the distinct attitudes towards PC. In one it's easy companionship and in another it's a social obligation. I'm beginning to realize that Malinowski employed both of these attitudes, and that may be why his account is so confusing. Well, at least part of it.

From this one instance we might formulate the hypothesis - a very tentative one - that among the Ontong Javanese names describe emotive experience, not observed forms or functions. (Lee 1950: 90)

From a purely terminological point of view this right here obliterates phatic communion: it is an emotive experience, much like Dell Hymes' reciprocal expressive function.

What we consider a causal relationship is a sequence of connected events, is to the Trobriander an ingredient of a patterned whole. He names this ingredient u'ula. A tree has a trunk, u'ula; a house has u'ula, posts; a magical formula has u'ula, the first strophe; an expedition has u'ula, a manager or leader; and a quartel contains an u'ula, what we would call a cause. There is no purposive so as to; no for the purpose of; there is no why and no because. The rarely used pela which Malinowski equates with for, means primarily to jump. In the culture, any deliberately purposive behavior - the kind of behavior to which we accord high status - is despised. There is no automatic relating of any kind in the language. (Lee 1950: 91)

At this point it does look like another aspect of either communism or their matriarchal system.

Preoccupation with social facts merely as self-contained facts is mere antiquarianism. In my field, a student of this sort would be an amateur or a dilettante, not an anthropologist. To be an anthropologist, he can arrange his facts in an upward slanting line, in a unilinear or multilinear course of development, in parallel lines or converging lines. Or he may arrange them geographically, with lines of diffusion connecting them; or schematically, using concentric circles. Or at least, he must indicate what his study leads to, what new insight we can draw from it. (Lee 1950: 92)

Maybe that is why Malinowski's PC is so reflexive and divorced from everything? Maybe he was an amateur in linguistic theory?

I have seen lineal pictures of nervous impulses and heartbeats, and with them I have seen pictures lineally a second of time. These were photographs, you will say, of existing fact, of reality; a proof that the line is present in reality. But I am convinced, perhaps due to my ignorance of mechanics, that we have not created our recording instruments in such a way that they have to picture time and motion, light and sound, heartbeats and nerve impulses lineally, on the unquestioned assumption of the line as axiomatic. The line is omnipresent and inescapable, and so we are incapable of questioning the reality of its presence. (Lee 1950: 92)

Wow. This is like Reggie Watts doing his French science.

If I walk along a path because I like the country, or if it is not important to get to a particular point at a particular time, then the insuperable puddle from the morning's shower is not frustrating; I throw stones into it and watch the ripples, and then choose another path. If the undertaking is of value in itself, a point good in itself, and not because it leads to something, then failure has no symbolic meaning; it merely results in no cake for supper, or less money in the family budget; it is not personally destructive. But failure is devastating in our culture, because it is not failure of the undertaking alone; it is the moving, becoming, lineally conceived self which has failed. (Lee 1950: 97)

Futility. This is what makes the purposeless exchange of words so paradoxical. It cannot, ideally, fail in expressing emotions, communicating ideas, or coordinating actions because it doesn't intend these. All in all, this paper meandered a bit on the line but that's excusable. It was fun. Would publish in any journal.

Cohen, Morris R. 1923. Introduction. In: Peirce, Charles S. Chance, Love and Logic: Philosophical Essays. London: Kegan Paul, i-xxxiii.

There are also philologists, those who are in a more narrow sense scholars, who dig not only for facts or roots, but also for the stones which may serve either for building or as weapons of destruction. Remote from all these, however, are the intellectual rovers who, in their search for new fields, venture into the thick jungle that surrounds the little patch of cultivated science. They are not gregarious creatures, these lonely pioneers; and in their wanderings they often completely lose touch with those who tread the beaten paths. Those that return to the community often speak strangely of strange things; and it is not always that they arouse sufficient faith for others to follow them and change their trails into high roads. (Cohen 1923: vii)

This is something I fear in my final publications about these readings. I may have ventured too far off the beaten path. It feels like responsibility because if you do good your words may be read for ages, if you mess up you won't be read even by the machines.

But universities, like other well-managed institutions, can find place only for those who work well in harness. The restless, impatient minds, like the socially or conventionally unacceptable, are thus kept out, no matter how fruitful their originality. (Cohen 1923: viii)

This is the sad song of C. S. Peirce.

To a rich imagination and extraordinary learning he added one of the most essential gifts of succesful system builders, the power to coin an apt and striking terminology. (Cohen 1923: viii)

The assistance of a demon.

He made important contributions not only in mathematical logic but also in photometric astronomy, geodesy, and psychophysics, as well as in philology. For many years Peirce worked on the problems of geodesy, and his contribution to the subject, his researches on the pendulum, was at once recognized by European investigators in this field. The International Geodetic Congress, to [|] which he was the first American representative, gave unusual attention to his paper, and men like Cellerier and Plantamour acknowledged their obligations to him. (Cohen 1923: ix-x)

For the amount of PC tropes here, "acknowledgement" sounds like propitiation, paying their dues. Is this light a citation and reference sound like they're a social and expressive matter, whereas to a utilitarian they're a means of finding textual information.

Hence, without denying discrepancies due solely to errors of observation, Peirce contends that "we must suppose far more minute discrepancies to exist owing to the imperfect cogency of the law itself, to a certain swerving of the facts from any definite formula." (Cohen 1923: xi)

This is a brilliant gold-mine of phraseology. There are discrepancies in interpretation of the term(s), the nuances of the definition are imperfectly understood, and the illustrations as well as the psychological attitude changes from illustration to illustration, making any definite pin-pointing of commonalities between otherwise thematically related, similarly inspired, scientific usages.

But in ordinary affairs, the occurrence of any regularity is the very thing to be explained. (Cohen 1923: xii)

Patterns.

A leading physicist of the 19th Century, Boltzmann, has suggested that the process of the whole physical universe is like that of a continuous shaking up of a hap-hazard or chance mixture of things, which thus gradually results in a progressively more uniform distribution. (Cohen 1923: xii)

British Office lady says merrily, "It's all random." [.gif] Side-bar.

The principal law of mind is that ideas literally spread themselves continuously and become more and more general or inclusive, so that people who form communities of any sort develop general ideas in common. When this continuous reaching-out of feeling becomes nurturing love, such, e.g., which parents have for their offspring or thinkers for their ideas, we have creative evolution. (Peirce 1923: xiii)

Do general ideas spread faster or better? Interestingly, "thinkers for their ideas" may be read as the love thinkers have for their ideas, and by a slip of sorts also as the love which parents have for their offspring as thinkers of their ideas.

Instead of postulating with Spencer and Bergson a continuous growth of diversity, Peirce allows for growth of habits both in diversity and in uniformity. The Spencerian mechanical philosophy reduces all diversity to mere spetial differences. There can be no substantial novelty; only new forms of combinations can arise in time. The creative evolution of Bergson though intended to support the claims of spontaneity is still like the Spencerian in assuming all evolution as proceeding from the simple to the complex. (Cohen 1923: xiv)

I suspect this is a bold simplification of Spencer, and while I'd like to swap growth of habits with mechanization and growth of diversity with differentiation, hopefully I don't have to, because Malinowski evidently steered clear of this dispute? Also, note that what I left out, like Malinowski, was uniformity, which could be ascribed to the social mind.

Certain of Peirce's suggestions as to the use of continuity in social philosophy have been developed by Royce in his theory of social consciousness and the nature of the community; but much remains to be worked out and we can but repeat Peirce's own hope: "May some future student go over this ground again and have the leisure to give his results to the world." (Cohen 1923: xvi)

This is "Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, and The Problems of Christianity, esp. Vol. 2 Baldwin (Mental Development) is heavily indepted to Royce in this respect." (footnote) - and, hey, maybe that student is me? Also, from below, writes Peirce: "Royce's opinions as developed in his World and Individualism are extremely near to mine. His insistence on the element of purpose in intellectual concepts is essentially the pragmatic position." - in this sense isn't Malinowski asking an anti-pragmatic question with PC?

[...] but the stoical maxim that the end of man is action did not appeal to him as much at sixty as it did at thirty. [...] "To say that we live for the sake of action would be to say that there is no such thing as a rational purport." (Cohen 1923: xx)

To say that the primitive man's mode of speech is only social is to deny him a rational purport.

Peirce's pragmatism has, therefore, a decidedly intellectual cast. The meaning of an idea or proposition is found not by an intuition of it but by working out its implications. It admits that thought does not constitute reality. Categories can have no concrete being without action or immediate feeling. (Cohen 1923: xxi)

The deathblow to intuitive formulations.

Also, by the use of popular terms which have a variety of meanings, one easily slides from one meaning to another, so that the most improbable conclusions are thun derived from seeming truisms. (Cohen 1923: xxv)

Don't I know it. Current approach hangs on drawing out the implications and attempting to map the area of meaning by way of paraphraseology.

There is, however, an even more positive direction in which symbolic logic serves the interest of philosophy, and that is in throwing light on the nature of symbols and on the relation of meaning. Philosophers have light-heartedly dismissed questions as to the nature of significan signs as 'merel' (most fatal word!) a matter of language. (Cohen 1923: xxvi)

Note that Malinowski used the fatal word "mere" a whole 6 times in PC!

All reasoning is from some concrete situation to another. (Cohen 1923: xxvi)

This truism I shall read as pointing to the value of illustrations (representative anecdotes).

A single penny will fall head or it will fall tail every time; to-morrow it will rain, or it will not rain at all. The probability of 1/2 or any other fraction means nothing in a single case. It is only because we feel the single event as representative of a class, as something which repeats itself, that we speak elliptically of the probability of a single event. (Cohen 1923: xxviii)

Speaking about weather, prognosticating. Theory building through grouping. There is nothing more repetitive in language than formulae of greeting or approach. It is in their linguistic nature to be recurring.

Murdock, George Peter 1942. Bronisław Malinowksi. The Yale Law Journal 51(8): 1235-1236.

[...] Malinowski brought to social science an extraordinary background as well as exceptional intellectual gifts. Knowing many kinds of people as a traveled man, knowing them critically as an observant man, and knowing them intimately as a sensitive man, he found himself unable to subscribe to the anthropological fiction that man is but a culture-bearing phantom who helplessly adopts and perpetuates any absurdty of custom to which he is exposed. He saw people rather as vibrantly alive, wrestling with their environments and collaborating with one another in the endeavor to satisfy basic biological urges, and adopting and transmitting only such techniques and usages as proved expedient in practice. (Murdock 1942: 1235)

Travelled, observant, and sensitive. The vibracy is in doubt, though, at least in PC. And the expedience in practice of some techniques is dubious (how expedient is flying witch magic?).

Primitive peoples were studied for their own sake, to unravel their historical relationships with one another rather than to contribute to the knowledge of manking as a whole. (Murdock 1942: 1235)

What does that even mean? He studied the things the natives do for their own sake, for their own sake? Is anthropology itself "futile"?

No longer can law be regarded as a closed system, impervious to the changing needs of individuals and to the evolving forms of their social relationsips. (Murdock 1942: 1236)

The common trope is that social relationships "grow", not evolve.

Malinowski, Bronisław 1942. A New Instrument for the Interpretation of Law - Especially Primitive. The Yale Law Journal 51(8): 1237-1254.

It suffers from some extravagances of style and treatment which are provocative. Some of its hesitancies and failures will stimulate further research. Certain achievements are lasting and will prove of great value to social science, anthropology, and to the theory of law, primitive and crystallized. (Malinowski 1942: 1237)

Same could be said of his own style. Is PC a lasting achievement? Can it's "hesitancies", like the contingencies in the peripatetic portion: "It would be even incorrect, I think", "I think that", "There can be no doubt". Is "crystallized" his latest opposition to "primitive"? What does it say about each? Is civilization crystallized? Is there plasticity in primitive stuff? There's some imagery here that should be thought/thawed out.

The authors have digested the older literature, especially the works of George Bird Grinnell. They have by original field-work supplemented the older data with regard to the legal principles and practices of their natives. (Malinowski 1942: 1237)

Turn of phrase. "Supplementing" could add to "expanding". Cf. "we reach the underlying principles of law and social propriety by examining custom and manners" (Malinowski 1922: 428). Note that "the fundamental tendency which makes the mere presence of others a necessity for man" (PC 3.3) is one grand principle.

In the study of communities where law is neither codified nor administered before courts, nor yet enforced by constabulary, certain problems arise which can be easily overlooked in a jurisprudence based on our own formal and crystallized systems. (Malinowski 1942: 1238)

Crystallization and codification. The difference between primitive and national culture: one can allow for a "holistic attitude to culture" (Gellner 1985: 7), whereas the the other aims to protect "a supposedly pre-existent cultural unity" (ibid, 6). The fixed texts and codified systems of a "civilization" have a past to contend with, whereas, as Malinowski writes at the end of Argonauts on the subject of history, the Trobrianders have a mythological view of the world where nearly everything carries the stamp of plasticity (especially evident in magical lore).

The very definition of law and its relation to custom, ethical rule, the norms of manner and etiquette, are problems which must be raised and answered by the field-worker, the student of comparative jurisprudence, and the sociologist who attempts to place law in relation to social control, and social control in relation to culture as a whole. (Malinowski 1942: 1238)

Very programmatic statements these. The list of variables are all cultural systems of codifications (or names/ideas for them), and subject of social control is one that would have interested me immensely some years ago but here I'll just note the search for micro-macro bridge and wait until I read Crime and Custom.

I shall try here to state the position of primitive jurisprudence in my own terms and from my point of view which, as far as I can see, is cognate to that of the present book. (Malinowski 1942: 1238)

Cognate - related, connected [points of view] descended from a common ancestor. General introduction to the selection of literature. Cognate points of view in Giddings, opposed in Mahaffy and Gardiner.

Is man's organized and implemented behavior, that is culture, subject to laws in the scientific sense? [...] "Social life and social relations are [...] basically incongruous and disorderly." (Malinowski 1942: 1238)

The rough ground of the everyday. Or in the immemorial words of one Tommy Wiseau: "Human behavior is chaotic."

Cairns, The Theory of Legal Science (1941) 53. The whole Chapter 4, "The Principle of Disorder", in which this sentence occurs, turns round the thesis that there is no such thing as an intrinsic determinism of culture. [...] "[...] The order which exists in human society at any given time is predominantly an achieved order, an invention at the center of which is man. [...]" All this to be begs the question of why, and for what reason the inventors of order invented it. In my opinion human inventions are determined by the needs of the individual and of the community. (Malinowski 1942: 1238; footnote 1)

I think this links up with the topics of the stranger and natural enemy. The mechanisms of reducing interference, i.e. obstracizing unpleasant people, is a social technique, even a technique of speaking, that in some sense maintains order and equilibrium in the dimension of recreation and relaxation.

Culture, however, primitive and developed alike, is subject to the laws of physics since human bodies are first and foremost lumps of matter. (Malinowski 1942: 1239)

Cf. "savage and civilized alike" (PC 9.4). The implications of this development (culture) are too heavy to draw out at the moment.

The end or purpose, the starting point, the determinisms of mechanics and hydro-dynamics, as well as of muscular and nervous energies, are integrated into a system which is neither chaotic, nor disorderly, which indeed is determined and regulated by principles open to observation and capable of being formulated. (Malinowski 1942: 1239)

This sounds like the question of whether or not conversation is an art and if techniques of teaching or studying it can be formulated. It may be noted that to my knowledge Malinowski himself did not employ, much like Jakobson, the term "phatic" in his actual ethnographic narratives. He liberally mentions parts of it, in Argonauts at least, but he doesn't seem to add much to it later on. I'll have to read his paper on lingustics and ethnography suggested by Annabelle Lukin in "The study of "living language"".

The structure of economics, of the normative system, of organized recreation, and of magical and religious cults is also based on the human needs which are satisfied in each such activity. (Malinowski 1942: 1239)

Is conversation an organized recreation or an institution or related to one? Is it related to the structure of economics (service encounters) and the normative system (manners and etiquette)?

Another line on which the existence of order in culture can be recognized is the recurrence of typical forms of organization, that is, of institutions. The family, the municipality, the organization of kinship and clanship, age-grades, and occupational teams are universals of primitive culture. Evolution consists in a constantly increasing institutional crystallization of such specific activities as those related to economic production, distribution, and consumption; the administration of law and justice; education and politics; practices of religious cult; the cultivation of science, literature, art and music; and the pursuit of sport and recreation. (Malinowski 1942: 1240)

If conversation is a form of social organization (assemly, association), then it must be an institution. PC is, evidently, a universal (instinct, encompassing all humans "alike"). Mahaffy's Art of Conversation can be read as an effort towards increasincly institutionalizing the free and aimless variety of social intercourse while the ideas Malinowski has helped inspire involve questioning "Why small talk is so excruciating" (Roberts 2018.10.28).

Starting from the material substratum of culture, we would find again a number of concrete, clear, and definite lines on which general and specific principles of cultural determination can be established. (Malinowski 1942: 1240)

Is there a social substratum of culture? Or is this too controversial for the post-social Malinowski?

Symbolism, notably in language, can be shown to fall under grammatical and syntactic, as well as semantic categories which are universal. Everywhere we find the same parts of speech, the same structure of [|] the sentence, the same uses of metaphor and abstraction, the same distinction between concrete and particular on the one hand, and general or conceptual on the other. (Malinowski 1942: 1240-1241)

Notice that "pragmatic categories" are not listed. By this time Malinowski has realized that the opposition between primitive and civilized use of speech does not fly.

Underlying such differences, however, there is the universal determinism based on the fact that man has always primarily to satisfy his basic organic needs; that in doing this by creating the artificial environment of culture, he has to act under conditions of order, continuity, predictability, and authority. (Malinowski 1942: 1241)

A possible positive interpretation for "primitive" - clothe it in the lingo of primary or dominant function. Emphasize its variability (differentiation) and universality at once. These conditions could relate to the PC tropes of reciprocity, company, mechanization, and renown.

In all this the fundamental rules of behavior defining the relations between individuals and groups re-appears once more, as an integral part of the determinism of culture. Agreements between individuals through contract; rules of conduct based on birth and status; reciprocal concatenations of duties which establish such typical relations as between husband and wife, parents and children, kinsmen and clansmen; the duties and privileges of status, rank, and authority, occur throughout and are invariably true to type. (Malinowski 1942: 1241)

Manners. Communion is, in this sense, a tacit agreement to act in a mutual state of affirmation and consent. One of such "minor" duties is listening to the other person, gifting the pleasure of being listened, and another the expression of affinity and consciousness of kind - I am like you; when disagreement or contention does arise or become explicit it leads to antipathies and tensions in social relations. In this case it's a metaphorical or implicit contract, a la P. Blanco (2010).

Examples of such laws are contained already in the previous argument. Those acquainted with the works of Sumner and Keller, Westermarck, Hobhouse, Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brown, R. W. Firth, A. I. Richards, G. P. Murdock - to mention but a few names - will easily supply many other cases. The large scale enterprise of digesting, ordering, and classifying ethnographic evidence, which under the title of "cross-cultural survey" is now in progress under the direction of G. P. Murdock at the Institute of Human Relations, Yale University, is perhaps the most important and decisive argument in favor of cultural determinism. (Malinowski 1942: 1241; footnote 2)

Since he only gives the titles and dates of his own publications, I'll just have to keep my eyes open for these names. (Or perform a string search in text versions of his books on archive.org)

Indeed, the more fundamental the law of nature or the law of physiology or psychology, the later is its appearance in human knowledge, hence in human statement. The primitive savage, very much like the modern man of science, refuses to see and to acknowledge the obvious. (Malinowski 1942: 1242)

Something like "exact meaning" again, here held "akin" to both extremes in terms of primary linguistic function (the social of the "primitive savage" and the works of "the modern man of science"). The observation about the fundamentalness of a law of nature seems cryptic - does it mean that if metabolism is a law of nature more fundamental than the social instinct, it enters human knowledge as a statement about human nature later than knowledge of social instinct? Were humans theoreticians first and hungry second? Polemics, of course, but I really don't grasp the implication. Problems of origin is very abstract matters.

We have thus the important distinction to make between (1) rules of cultural determinism accepted, but neither known nor stated; and (2) rules explicitly standardized and formulated in early symbolic gesture or sound. [↩] To this distinction we have to add another. Among the rules stated and known, as well as taught and transmitted, there are again two classes. The first is automatically sanctioned by the coercion of efficiency or by the convenience of conventionality. The coercion of efficiency can be clearest seen in technological rules. [...] The rules of convenience can be found most clearly in the regularities and conventions which control human relations in everyday common life. From the very outset human behavior had to be regular and predictable, since it was collective or social. The time-table of daily life; the manners and conventions of common feeding, of uniform dress, of custom in walking, working, and sleeping were indispensable. Human beings have to depend upon the behavior of others. The high value of convention and uniformity in primitive cultures, and again in our modern cultures of mass production, is not a freak, but a necessity. Thus, a whole set of regularities of human behavior remain outside any socially organized enforcement. In addition to these, many rules of manners, [|] conventions of behavior, tricks of useful technique, material and social, once adopted prove their own utility and efficiency. There are also no temptations to break or to stretch such rules. (Malinowski 1942: 1242-1243)

Habits in all human activities. Effectiveness and conventionality possibly results of the economy of effort of thought. related to Ruesch's "social technique" (1950). (Note that the very interesting source about Dale Carnegie was by Gail Parker (1977) and links up rather smoothly with Malinowski's statements about ethics and sincerity.

As soon as a rule curbs certain physiological propensities or delimits the advantages and claims of two or more parties, there enters the element of divergent interest. Thus rules referring to the distribution of food, rules related to sex, to authority, to privilege, and duty respectively; all the rules which impose more effort and less reward on a class, group, or individual for the advantage of another, have to be sanctioned. Here enter also the rules which protect life and property, and prevent bodily harm between individuals, that is, rules of criminal law. (Malinowski 1942: 1243)

Here we have in the first instance the divergent interests of speakers and listeners, in which some parity (exchange of roles) is necessary for reciprocity. The rules imposing more effort and less reward t particular people brings up once again the situation of the lone ethnographer and his means of acquiring food and shelter from people he studies but does not necessarily understand. The modern approach would involve the discrimination of black people in U.S., and it seems appropriate that his fieldwork in his later years involved Africa (cf. Mau Mau).

Homonyms are a perennial source of confusion in scientific argument. In the study of law the confusion created by the multiple meanings given to the main term has been as vicious as anywhere. In our meaning at least four different meanings have made their appearance. (Malinowski 1942: 1243)

Is'n that so. Annabelle Lukin can't even read "phatic communion", she looks at the text and utters "phatic communication". Was she seeing a hallucination? Or is "communion" really unpronounceable? Note that I have to deal with either less (3) or more, or infinitely more meanings to the word "phatic". Malinowski and Jakobson would come first and second. La Barre would become third but then it's up to a debate whether he should be grouped in with those who have a different outlook on speech (Austin, Wescott) or even conversation (de Laguna 1927). And then I wouldn't know where to place Gardiner in all of this since his contribution is not as easily reduced to an exact formula.

Law (2) is the rule of conduct standardized in behavior or verbally formulated. The rules of knowledge, of technology, of co-operation, of common life, and of convention, enter into this class. The rules of primitive knowledge usually occur as imperative or, at least, normative statements, since they are formulated invariably so as to fit pragmatic contexts. They bear a strong surface resemblance to other imperatives of tradition. (Malinowski 1942: 1243)

Related to the ideas held by the community about its institutions. My meta-theory of phaticity, as it currently stands, is that these "phatic tropes" I'm trying to put into context are "formulated" in the same way ("invaniably") to fit the "pragmatic context" of what we call small talk because they are derived from a selective or limited reading Malinowski's original essay. I am going to argue boldly that "phatic communion" was a "critical term", implying a critical theory of communication, rather than a positive and empirical study of social speech, its psychological mechanisms (cognitive-semantic aspects), its interrelations with other modes of action (pragmatic, functional anthropology of culture), and its concomitant theory of the ever-complex expression of emotion, sentiment, and attitude./p>

Law (3) applies to rules of conduct which refer to relations between individuals and groups, delimit divergent interests, and curtail disruptive physiological and sociological tendencies. Here enter most rules of property, contract, status and authority, as well as the rules protecting human life and limb, and limiting sexual rights to well-defined social relations. (Malinowski 1942: 1243)

This curtailment sounds like censorship (around the village fire? excisement and ostracizing); you keep "the stranger" away because he has disruptive tendencies (interference). "Well-defined social relations" can be read as (1) the crystallization of human relations in social agreements (formal contracts), (2) The quality of the social relation; well-defined as in normatively controlled, publicly acknowledged, etc., and (3) as the progress from negligible to weak to strong ties sensu Granovetter (1973), e.g. the invisible network of bonds (and its visibility, e.g. social media and public following).

The aim of this little list is to show clearly that some of the ambiguities must be eliminated before jurisprudence can be made safe from its own verbal confusion. The differences indicated are real and the categories are distinct. (Malinowski 1942: 1244)

General introduction to the work on PC and its "verbal confusion". The differences and distinct conceptions I have in mind are the three (or n) enumerated above.

They lack above all the element of sanction as a social reaction. Law (3), on the other hand, corresponds definitely to Law as we use the term in our own society. Rules which delimit claims and interests have to be known and clearly stated. Their maintenance is a matter of concern to those whose claims and interests are involved. Laws of this type are often positively sanctioned, that is, strict observance is rewarded, quite as much as inadequacy and breach punished. (Malinowski 1942: 1244)

Positively sanctioned elements are equally punished and rewarded. The question is, what's the sanction for not speaking the local language or being idiokinetic?

To study the claims within a family or a local group, or a military society, we must know the structure and the working of such an institution. (Malinowski 1942: 1245)

This took a sudden dark turn. Was Malinowski about to write about military society as a total institution like Goffman did in Asylum? As an aside, it's mighty suspicious that a Polish subject of Austria dies of a heart-attack when he is going around the U.S. and working on getting the states to participate in WWII. There's something like All My Lenins behind the answer. How many actual films have they made about Malinowski? (The Young Indiana Jones segment doesn't count.)

The positive aspect, that is the need of understanding why laws work before we proceed to their breach, is also clearly stated. "The members of the group, working within its order, then either manage so to handle divergent claims as to keep the 'group' still the group, or else the law-jobs fail to get done, and the group explodes or dribbles apart, or dies" (P. 274). (Malinowski 1942: 1245)

Likewise, it would be better to proceed from Mahaffy's theory of conversation and demonstrate the twists and turns Malinowski undertakes to criticize the natives and British under(educated)-classes. The exploding, dribbling and dying group is way too vivid a figure.

Law is not an end itself, but an indispensable instrumentality for the achievement of the real, ultimately biological ends of human activities. (Malinowski 1942: 1245)

Is this biological determinism or functionalism? What is the "real, ultimate" biological end of free and aimless social intercourse or is it an insincere form of instrumentality, a social technique?

The sociologist and the ethnographer on the other hand must primarily be interested in the working of social control, that is, the maintenance of order. (Malinowski 1942: 1246)

Sounds like the activity of the social mind. Superficially, that is. It actually sounds likeEdwin Earp's The Social Engineer (1911): "the establishment of permanent social control [...] The great task in social engineering is to keep society conscious of its needs until it can be aroused to do what ought to be done to better the conditions of which it is aware, or to change the social habits and customs of a people so that evil may be avoided or good achieved." (Earp 1911: 3-4)

The whole work of courts, judges, and counsel, that is, Law (4), moved within a well established reality which changed but little, and the foundations of which could be taken for granted. (Malinowski 1942: 1246)

Phraseology for intuitiveness and continued influence.

The concentration of human beings in large cities, the nervous strain of modern life, certain type of labor in mines, factories, and tropical climates have created new environments for the human organism, new diseases, and new needs for hygiene and preventive medicine. (Malinowski 1942: 1247)

An unpleasant tension no distance can shake off.

Every political revolution creates new theories and new conditions of law; Napoleon's code, the German Bürgerliche Gesetzbuch, the new constituents of Russia, of Nazy Germany, and of Fascist Italy are examples. Law is but a part of social and cultural engineering. [...] There was an attempt to make a whole nation sober by law. It failed. In Nazi Germany a whole nation is being transformed into a gang of bloodthirsty world-bandits through the instrumentality of law, among others. [...] The Italian dictator is trying to make his intelligent, cynical, and peace-loving people into courageous heroes. [...] A great communistic UNion has tried to abolish God, marriage, and the family, again by law. (Malinowski 1942: 1247)

What do these countries have in common? Soviet Union was "great"? What if Polish intellectuals were hunted down when the "new constitutions" were ripping Poland in two?

We must have juridical planning quite as much as we now have planned economics, planned politics, planned education and planned cultural regimes. Planning in itself, as we know from engineering, banking, and education, need not become a vice or a danger. Doctrinaire planning, the planning on lines of crude and partisan visions such as we find in totalitarianism, becomes a vice [|] and a peril because it is done without any consideration given to the realities of human culture and human nature. (Malinowski 1942: 1247-1248)

Did planned cultural regimes work out? Soviet realism, anyone? Doctrinaire planning and analytic planning are probably something that we might read in the history of modern China.

To take but one concrete example: the creation of collective security in our future world is the very prerequisite of the survival of culture. (Malinowski 1942: 1248)

How is this not culture qua collective consciousness and "The central political idea of nationalism" (Gellner 1985: 6)?

The ethnographer is thus compelled to study the working of the rules and principles of tribal law or custom under the microscope, as it were. He cannot even discover and formulate them, unless he observes at close range the battle of conflicting claims, the working out of a compromise which invariably tends to conform to the general statement of the rule as this is found in tradition. (Malinowski 1942: 1249)

Granularity (of tropes), and the conflicting statements between Malinowski and others (Spencer, Durkheim, Mahaffy).

He also discovers why this is so. He can ascertain and state that the claims as between husband and wife, chief and subject, clan leader and other members, are related to what these people do together and what they have to contribute, one and all, to the concerted actions, as well as what they receive as reward of their contributions. (Malinowski 1942: 1249)

You "begin to wonder languidly as to what that fellow may be at" (Conrad 1914: 15). Malinowski's bias may be that the primitive does not "contribute" to his recreation.

In some cases and in certain cultures the coercion of force enters as an effective factor. We have such institutions as slavery, serfdom, tyranny, and exploitation by secret societies or privileged groups. Yet even here, a further analysis discloses that the organization of force an oppression is related functionally to such phenomena as the military constitution of the tribe, the recruiting of the slave class by inter-tribal wars, and other general principles of cultural orientation which make force possible within and necessary without. (Malinowski 1942: 1249)

Malinowski the conspiracy theorist. National character - cultural orientation.

The whole domain of sociol control, as this has been named by Professor E. A. Ross, imposes itself on the [|] work of the ethnographer and on his cogitations in jurisprudence, as strongly as it seems to have been alien and unpalatable to the lawyer-craftsman of the past and even of the present. (Malinowski 1942: 1249-1250)

A later lead. What's the sum total of his cogitations in linguistics?

To justify this extensive monologue I would like to say that the authors perhaps have not quite clearly stated the background of their own theory. (Malinowski 1942: 1250)

Ironic phraseology because that's exactly why the three legs of the stool are wobbly.

We find no bibliography of ethnographic literature, no summing up of the several points of view to which the present book is an excellent corrective. (Malinowski 1942: 1250)

This is the problem I have with E. R. Clay. Had he given better bibliographical information and presented his case more academically it wouldn't have to take you to get to the end of the book for the crucial information of its context and true content (arguing with Huxley).

This might lead the reader to suspect that the writers have not heard about such contributions as Law and the Social Sciences by Huntington Cairns, (1935); or William A. Robinson's Civilisation and the Growth of Law, (1935); or An Introduction to the Sociology of Law by M. S. Timasheff, (1939); or that they underrate the work of Roscoe Pound; of L. Petrazhitsky; of H. Kelsen; of G. Gurvitch; of E. Ehrlich - to mention only a few outstanding names. (Malinowski 1942: 1250)

Why in these nuggety, condensed lists? Why never a nod when their ideas are addressed on the go? I may be authoritative in my source-work but carelessness and mask of originality of this kind I cannot stand.

I find also some misgivings about the style in which the book is written. In many ways it is magnificent, inspiring, candid, and attractive. It carries the reader along, it compels his attention, and all its extravagances and involutions are clearly a matter of deliberate purpose. [|] With all this, the style remains cryptic. This might have been easily remedied if, in relation to certain crucial passages where fundamental concepts are defined or a new and original position taken, the writers have given, after their racy and inspired phrasing of a brilliant idea, a sober translation into ordinary and accepted language. (Malinowski 1942: 1249-1250)

Illustrations and intuitiveness. The author of "Malinowski's Style" missed this, and probably other stylistic and philological remarks Malinowski has made in his many reviews and forewords. This is his description of his own narrative style, as characterized by Payne. His was a character-assassination, it feels like.

This is how the cardinal concept is defined:
Law has as one of its main purposes to make men go round in more or less clear ways; law does in fact to some extent make men go round in more or less clear ways. Law purposes to channel behavior in such manner as to prevent or avoid conflict; and law does in important degree so channel behavior. Without the purpose attribute, law is unthinkable; without the effect attribute, law cannot be said to 'prevail' in a culture, to have 'being' in it" (Llewellyn & Hoebel, The Cheynne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence, p. 20).
(Malinowski 1942: 1251)

I like this metaphorical use of "channel" (should start collecting them more and maybe cover its area of meaning this way). Malinowski probably doesn't like that this definition hinges on purposiveness and not something empirical in the situation.

Yet here also sentence after sentence could be quoted in which new words, original and startling - at times what appear to me excellent neologisms - are introduced, yet without any guarantee to the reader that he translates the meaning correctly. (Malinowski 1942: 1251)

Note the similar instance of translating in illustrations. Phraseologically it's a perfect companion to "old words".

Yet here once more it would be difficult for me to keep this passage for future quotation, or to use it as a statement of first rate authority of a point on which I am fundamentally in agreement - or so it appears to me. (Malinowski 1942: 1252)

This is kinda how I write.

These criticisms might appear captious. I would like them to be constructive. This book is excellent. It cries out, however, for a second volume on Cheyenne law in which I would hope for additional data. I would also hope that some of the cryptic passages of the present book might be translated into the plain, conventional English of social science at its best, an English of which both Llewellyn and Hoebel have proved themselves masters on other occasions. (Malinowski 1942: 1253)

Captious is "tending to find fault or raise petty objections." My current object is to translate the cryptic phrases in the definition of PC into the English conventional to sources his phrases are similar with or different from in a significant way.

Even those who might regard the present book as "a major trouble case in modern social science", will profit by reading it, struggling with it, and clarifying their own ideas. (Malinowski 1942: 1254)

Nice. This use of the triad is almost Peircean (perception, reaction, cogitation).

Malinowski, Bronisław 1941. Man's Culture and Man's Behavior. Sigma Xi Quarterly 29(3): 182-196.

Culture is clearly the fullest context of all activities. It is the vast instrumentality through which man achieves his ends, both as an animal that must eat, rest, and reproduce; and as the spiritual being who desires to extend his mental horizons, produce works of art, and develop systems of faith. (Malinowski 1941: 182)

It is possible to extend one's mental horizons through conversations, use encharming social techniques, and originate religious ideas in communion of peech.

It seems hardly even necessary to stress the fact that the student of contemporary social phenomena and also the psychologist must attack their problems within the real context in which these happen: the context of culture. (Malinowski 1941: 182)

Reminds me of Malinowski's influence on Ray Birdwhistell. Due to Lotman, kultuurikontekst is actually a rather frequent Estonian word.

We have to estalish clearly determined relations between cultural variables embodied into formulæ of general applicability. (Malinowski 1941: 183)

These formulae probably have the convenience of conventionality.

The legitimate subject matter of anthropology, as well as of other social sciences, is culture. The experimental approach to this subject matter must be based on direct observation of collective, organized behavior through field work. (Malinowski 1941: 183)

Other subject matters of anthorpology are illegitimate? Once again, empiricism and self-contradiction in relation with something collective.

Obviously anthropology has no claims whatsoever to deal with the scientific problem of culture alone. It had certain initial advantages. To use them fully it must, first and foremost, disclaim some spurious pretenses. (Malinowski 1941: 184)

Recording for the rarity of "spuriousness".

There are, however, other interests, values, and motives connected with science or with art which transcend any biological determinism. We are thus led to the fuller analysis as to what the drive or motives of human beings are, and also as to the principle and forces of human organization. (Malinowski 1941: 183)

These are the "higher" instrumentalities of culture. It is appealing, at this point, to place emphasis in the "Art" in Mahaffy's Art of Conversation. But not enough to contradict the gregariousness of our progenitors.

Accordingly, man is not merely impelled by hunger and thirst, by love, and the desire to sleep. There are other motives connected with ambition, rank, doctrine, and mythology which establish as powerful incentives for conduct as do those of an innate drive. Instrumentality obtains throughout. In other words, it is always found that a human being is impelled to a specific activity in order to attain a desired end. (Malinowski 1941: 187)

These are the so-called meta-needs. The "always" casts doubt on the validity of all his observations of futility.

Finally, it will be possible to show that the integrative values, such as ideas, belief, moral rule, are also determined and significant through their relation to culture as a whole. (Malinowski 1941: 187)

Oddly stretched triad.

The concept of basic need differs from that of drive, in that it refers to the collective exercise of individual drives, integrated with reference to the community as a whole. The satisfaction of basic needs is predicated with reference to all the organisms, to environmental conditions, and to the cultural setting of the community. (Malinowski 1941: 189)

"They are desires massed and generalized; desires felt simultaneously and continuously by thousands, or even by millions of men, who are by them simultaneously moved to concerted action" (Giddings 1896: 37).

To make the last argument more concrete and precise, let us again embody it into a diagrammatic presentation:
Drive (1) - Instrumental performance - Culturally defined situation - Drive (2) - Consummatory act - Satisfaction (meta-physiological).
This is obviously a much more accurate and less abstract representation than the vital sequence previously shown. (Malinowski 1941: 191)

Pseudo-sociality makes communion instrumental and a mediate vehicle for an external drive.

Man very often does not eat by hunger, hardly ever by hunger alone. He eats at the right time, the right place, and in the right company. His tastes and values are highly shaped, and even when hungry, he will not touch food defined in his own culture as disgusting, unpalatable, or morally repugnant. "One man's meat is another man's poison": my cannibal friends in New Guinea would have developed a healthy appetite is confronted with missionary steak, but turned away in disgust from my tinned Camembert cheese, sauerkraut, or frankfurters, which latter they regarded as gigantic worms. (Malinowski 1941: 191)

Kurgid on rohelised junnid.

In primitive communities such special institutions may be absent or rudimentary. Nevertheless, the equivalents of codifications, of adjudication, and enforcement are never absent. The essence of custom and norm is that it coordinates behavior; hence it has to be known by all those who cooperate. Many norms nurb innate tendencies, define privileges and duties, limit ambition, and circumscribe the use of wealth. There is invariably a tendency to circumvent them. Together with the need of force implied in the imperative of social order, we have in authority a principle which implies the existence of force socially determined and physically implemented. We find everywhere, therefore, the political principle, that is, the socially or culturally determined distribution of force and the right to use it. (Malinowski 1941: 193)

In the previous paper there was something like this in relation with censure (or sanction?). In any case this gets to the heart of it: the tropes of national character and natural enemy have to do with the so-called political principle.

A clear definition of the symbolic process is still lacking. Its existence was implied throughout, especially in our statements concerning the codes of human behavior, the rules of conduct, the educational processes which largely consist in verbal instruction, and the inculcation of systems of value. (Malinowski 1941: 194)

The neurophysiology of the semeion is still unsolved?

Reinforcement, however, accounts only for the formation of habits, that is, of individual acquired types of behavior. As long as habit is not infectious of public, it is not a real unit of culture. Culture begins when the transition between habit and custom is made. Custom can be defined as a habit made public by communication from one individual to others and transferable, that is, capable of being ingrained by one generation on to the next. (Malinowski 1941: 195)

Anticipating memes. Though, I did appreciate someone writing about the merit of not applying evolutionary theory on culture.

The raw materials of both sociability and symbolism can also be assumed as pre-existent to the actual emergence of culture. The long infancy of the human species and the formation of families and of family groups was undoubtedly precultural. These are mere assumptions for which proof need not be given, but which are essentially plausible. (Malinowski 1941: 195)

This is how he finally solves the instinct and trend problem. He pulls a Jespersen.

Richards, Audrey I. 1943. Bronisław Kaspar Malinowski. Man 43: 1-4.

Bronisław Malinowski died suddenly at Yale on May 16th, 1942, after taking the chair at the formal opening of a Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences, of which he had been chosen PResident. [...] He had recently plunged with his usualy energy into planning for post-war reconstruction. He had always claimed that the anthropologist had a special contribution to make to the study of modern society, and used constantly to stimulate his students by comparing primitive institutions and their own. (Richards 1943: 1)

Material for an indecent short story of a poisoned ethnographist. Planning for post-war reconstruction is exactly the impression given off by the last two papers I read.

He mocked at English customs, and hurried each vacation to the more congenial atmosphere of the Tyrol, but London remained the centre of his intellectual life and interests, and he wrote of it with nostalgia during the last years of his life. (Richards 1943: 1)

A variant of pleasant atmosphere.

The integrative function of magic and religion was another subject which continually absorbed his interestsi. Initially he followed Durkheim in his stress on the social importance of religious rites and beliefs, but these views he reformulated in the light of direct observations on primitive societies. He also combined them with a definitely psychological approach, that is to say, with an emphasis on the part played by magic and religion in the life of the individual. (Richards 1943: 2)

This is what is at stake with the atmosphere.

His quick sympathies and his unusual linguistic gifts and powers of human contact made it possible for him to share in a quite exceptional way the life of the people whom he had gone to observe. (Richards 1943: 2)

Enchanting.

His passion for detail was combined with the true field-worker's gift for swift, almost intuitive, judgment of social situations and a power of formulating quickly the problem at issue. His field-work lectures were full of warnings of the dangers of merely collecting facts without system or purpose. (Richards 1943: 2)

Enchanting platitudes of theory.

Malinowski early abandoned formal lecturing, and always ignored the prescribed University curriculum. Students worked at any problem in which he was at the moment intesely absorbed. It was in seminars that his teaching gifts were best displayed. (Richards 1943: 3)

This is personally appealing.

They were never bored. 'Invite Malinowski to the opening session of a conference,' said a shrewd missionary. 'Half the audience will disagree with him violently, but the discussions will go with a swing from the start.' 'I have just had a letter from Malinowski,' said another ruefully. 'His language is so appalling that I cannot let my secretary file the note. But he has given me enough ideas to work on for half a year.' In this power of stimulus his genius lay. (Richards 1943: 4)

"Demonic", almost, this power of stimulus.

Gluckman, Max 1947. Malinowski's 'Functional' Analysis of Social Change. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 17(2): 103-121.

Each published essay shows that Malinowski failed to work out clearly the structure of his own thesis. He is muddled about his basic philosophical and moral assumptions, and his reasoning is illogical and internally inconsistent. (Gluckman 1947: 103)

Synonyms for what is by now more than clear.

In this particular example Malinowski's obsession against history leads him to a shattering egocentricity. (Gluckman 1947: 105)

Phraseology.

Malinowski writes: 'it is now generally agreed upon that Europeans form an integral part of any contact situation. [...] But I think it is pushing a legitimate commonplace too far when it is suggested [by Schapera] that "the missionary, administrator, trader and labour recruiter must be regarded as factors in the tribal life in the same way as are the chief and the magician". [...] Yet another writer [Fortes] has claimed: "contact agents can be treated as integrally part of the community"'. (Gluckman 1947: 107)

In this light it is almost ironic that someone should invent such a term as "phatic expert".

The argument must be taken seriously, since Malinowski bases on this a concept of the 'common factor' which he raises to the dignity of treatment in a separate essay: 'whenever there is a common measure between the intentions of European impact and the existing needs of the African society, change can lead to a new thriving forms of cultural coöperation [...] the absence of a common factor leads to conflict' (p. 70). (Gluckman 1947: 110)

This reads like the consciousness of kind between social minds. National character and natural enemy, of course.

This section points to another weakness implicit in Malinowski's scheme. Whenever he tries to frame analytical problems, he poses practical problems in the most naive terms. He begins the book with a statement that there is no difference between theoretical and applied research. He cannot, with his concepts, do otherwise, for, as we shall se, they bind him to the description of unique realities. (Gluckman 1947: 111)

Yup, his turning the social vices outlined by Mahaffy into illustrations of "unique realities" is somewhat naive.

A variant of migrant labour from the reserves in South Africa is migrant labour of African labour tenants, bound to work six months in a year for the farmer on whose land they live. Statute has been piled on statute to keep these tenantse bound to their farmers. All are unsuccessful, for they operate against the dominant movement from country to town. Similar legislation has also occurred in the history of Europe. (Gluckman 1947: 113)

This occurred in Czarist Russia at the end of the 19th Century, particularly in the west (Estonia) and south (Crimea) corners of the Empire. A stronger meaning to "bond". Contractual formalities are included. Prohvet Maltsvet is primarily about the separatist sect of early Christian dogmatism (no colorful clothes, braided hair, alcohol, tobacco, or pig meat).

Malinowski considers the urban areas of Africa to be 'a new cultural reality with its own determinisms'. It is impossible, in Malinowski's terms, to set lines for studying so-called tribalized and detribalized Africans. In his framework these categories of people live in different 'cultural realities'. (Gluckman 1947: 114)

Berger and Luckmann (1966) immediately come to mind. Tribal cultures are as-if isolated "pockets of meaning". At least on a global scale, they are. Spheres of cultural influence would thus constitute "larger pockets". Giddings' ethnogenesis could do much service here, and I suspect that in his later work Malinowski developed ideas in there which he otherwise cricizised. Since one of my major points is that "phatic" is a critical term, it could do well to collect instances (from his reviews, for example) of him criticizing an idea that he later employs, like Gluckman writes on the first page: "He attacks those who do not belong to his elect by distorting what they have said, and then he unconsciously puts forward their views to demolish someone else." (infra, 103)

But he is still tribalized, for of course he does not cease to be influenced by tribal culture. To understand his behaviour we must study: how far does he act under urban and industrial influences, common to all urban areas throughout the world? e.g. in forming civil leagues, trade unions, &c. How far is his behaviour determined by poverty, lack of skill, and other characteristics which he shares with workers elsewhere in capitalist countries? (Gluckman 1947: 114)

This is a better exposition of the "the primitive mind [...] among savages or our own uneducated classes" (PC 4.3). Though it's such a hefty topic that I might have to leave it out of my project for now, it would merit a separate, more critical, context? Binding it with PC outright would reduce its appeal among those who I target as interested in a clear examination of the semio-linguistic aspects involved with PC. Let the outright social (justice, even?) problems stand in a corpus biased and pre-judged opinionsium for utilization by those who, "through their better penetration and ability of interpreting them, may find points which escape my attention" (Malinowski 1922: 24).

Malinowski's conception of culture contact as occurring between 'institutions', organized systems of human activities, shows the same weaknesses. His unit of culture is the 'institution', 'a group of people united for the pursuit of a simple or complex activity; always in possession of a material endowment and a technical outfit; organized on a definite legal or customary charter, linguistically formulated in myth, legend, rule, and maxim; and trained and prepared for carrying out its task' (pp. 49-50). (Gluckman 1947: 114)

This I have already seen - the concept of institution is loose enough that a mode of speech in communal leisure has its own futile purpose (that of uniting people "linguistically" in free and aimless converse), and its own common lore - the representative tropes of PC, such as talking about the weather, exchanging pleasantries like automata, the tedium of collective monologues, etc. As to training and preparation, this is where Mahaffy shines with his art of conversation, though the very word itself offers very interesting results in his other major works (Descartes, Twelve Lectures on Primitive Civilisations, I've also downloaded some of his articles which look interesting because he was a classic philologist who evidently wrote quite well).

Culture conditions the individuals to amalgamate nature and nurture. To feed and enjoy sex, to be warm and protected, are needs that animals satisfy directly, but human beings only in co-operation conditioned by the whole external and transcendent apparatus of culture, including the symbols of language and ritual. (Gluckman 1947: 114)

Exactly my quibble with his criticism of the collective consciousness in 1913 and flirtation with it in 1922 and outright orgy of it when he forsakes "social" in the 1930s (probably due to criticism) and becomes so holistic with his "culture" that it is difficult not to suspect metaphysics and transcendentalism. It's as if the man was always looking for a corner where he didn't have to engage much in theory, where he could slide scale of simplification and generalization as he wished while still coming across as intelligible enough. He first ran from theory and then jumped head first into it with "post-war planning" of "a military society".

Clearly we can compare European and African marriage and even say they satisfy similar needs, but I cannot see that this applies save to a limited extent to the analysis of culture change with its complicated strands of interaction. Certainly it does not justify Malinowski's statement that 'commensurable institutions' act primarily on one another across the division of culture. Not even Malinowski can maintain this in his analyses. For example, he shows that missionary work affects chieftainship, sex morality, economic life, &c. Conversion itself cannot be studied only as the supplanting of one set of religious beliefs by another; it has to be anlaysed in a complex social situation. (Gluckman 1947: 115)

"Akin"-ness. Everywhere he can, Malinowski emphasized how alike the savage and civilized are, yet holds that the two must be studied with some grand, even sentimental qualification of difference and segregation.

Not all Zulu are converted because they feel that Christianity is a better religion than the ancestor-cult. It does not for them respond better to 'the human psychology of thwarted hope, of fears and anxieties', or provide a stronger affirmation of human immortality (pp. 47-48). More women than men become Christians, more younger sons than elder sons, more unimportant than important people: there are here wide ranges of structural problems. (Gluckman 1947: 116)

"Over and over again in a multidude of ways, the religion of the individual brings to focus the mingled motives and desires of an unfulfilled life." (Gordon Allport)

The Zulu migrant labourer goes to the mines to earn money to feed and clothe his family: that is one reason why the mine owner develops the mine. Is this a common factor, because both satisfy in the mine their basic needs? It is the centre of their interdependence, and also the centre of their conflicts. The situation is too complex for this reduction. (Gluckman 1947: 115)

Superficially this is appealing because the centre of interdependence is the "bond" in several instances of PC. What needs are involved? How is pseudo-social intercourse different from social intercourse?

Since 'the so-called elements or "traits" of a culture do not form a medley [...] but are always integrated into well-defined units', he implies that it is wrong to break up these units and abstract patterns or aspects of them for analysis. But to generalize we must isolate certain aspects of a situation or institution; real situations and institutions are too complicated for comparative analysis. (Gluckman 1947: 116)

Otherwise they become a curiosity shop of imponderabilia. The primary principles must be elucidated, their legitimacy put to the test somehow, even if for comparison only. General introduction?

His 'theory' of institutions still provides a chart for field-work: it is useless for analyses of social change. Nowhere does he describe change in any but vague and glib general terms, tied always to a particular and unique reality. In so far as his charts on specific problems have value, it is a descriptive value only. (Gluckman 1947: 116)

Catch 22: attempt to describe origin and differentiation and you are a cultural evolutionist; don't describe fast and variable processes and cultural staticist (kultuuristaatik - konservatiiv?).

But while we must be prepared to recognize the possibility that the description of real events and surface comparisons in mainly similar fields, with a few generalizations at a low level of abstraction, may be the limit of our achievements, we can still try to develop our discipline into a science able to correlate the universal aspects of events, independent of a particular cultural reality. For this attempt we must discard Malinowski's 'theoretical' analysis as sterile. His own work remains an invaluable code for field-research. (Gluckman 1947: 118)

This is what Malinowski did and didn't do. His generalizations aren't general enough (at least in PC), and he didn't actually compare the politeness behaviour of "savage" and "civilized", only noted their similarity, as he did on many occasions elsewhere unrelated to the subject matter of speech. His claim of universality comes from Mahaffy, not only in the quoted portion about be compulsion to polite conversation but specifically in its universality in Mahaffy's book.

I have analysed the political structure of modern Zululand to show that though chief and administrator co-operate in routine administration, and under the pressure of the force of government, in many ways they are opposed. The administrator stands for one set of values, set of which are desired by many Zulu, the chief for another set. The chief represents tribal history and values; he is related by kinship to many of his people; he lives his social life with them. Above all, he leads their opposition to European innovations and rule. (Gluckman 1947: 120)

A great addition to the "desires massed and generalized" aspect of collective consciousness. The situation here described is in many ways similar tose of the natives of Trobriander islands but Malinowski reportedly paid no attention to external influence in his report and only criticized the British influence in footnotes and on theoretical issues.

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. 1949. Functionalism: A Protest. American Anthropologist 51(2): 320-323.

Malinowski's views of society is rooted in utilitarianism, and his theory is one of a series of theories of one general kind. There was the theory of Lester Ward that "desires of associated men" act as "social forces" and produce the institutions which constitute the social order. He was followed by Albion Small (1905) who proposed to explain the features of social life as the product of six basic interests - health, wealth, sociability, knowledge, beauty, rightness. Sumner (Folkways, 1907) sought to explain social evolution as the result of four basic motives - hunger, sex passion, vanity and fear. Malinowski produced a variant, in which culture is substituted for society, and seven "basic biological needs" are substituted for the desires, interests and motives of the earlier writers. (Radcliffe-Brown: 321)

I've noticed Ward in Mal's writings, but these names are new and no citations are given here.

They do derive cultural necessities and imperatives from physiological sources. The outcome of this procedure is apparent that all social institutions appear right and good by definition. Behavior stems from needs; it follows that the institutional manifestations of these needs are reasonably, necessary and just. (Radcliffe-Brown: 321)

The same could be said about why Malinowski's work was not influential in Poland between the wars - a politically motivated drive to construct national culture for peasants does not work well if you think everything in peasant life already fulfils a function.

So far as I am concerned, and I can only speak for myself, the statement that I take wants and needs as individual, inborn physical mechanisms is a falsehood invented by the authors for some reason of their own. I generally avoid any use of the word "need" since it is tainted with ambiguity. (Radcliffe-Brown: 321)

Ambiguous terms do attract loose thinkers. It's part of why "phatic" as a critical term is so appealing to the likes of Barthes, Eco, and Žižek. Though in each case the author has a relatively poor understanding of the concept and attempts to give it a new reason. Note that "needs" stand for "instincts", the latter word just fell out of favor at some point ("the herd instinct").

It is true that I make use of the concept of function, and I did so in my lectures at Cambridge and the London School of Economics before the time when Malinowski began to study anthropology. All physiologists make use of the same concept, but they are not called functionalists. The concept, as I use it, is one that enables us to study the interrelations of a structure and an associated process. (Radcliffe-Brown: 322)

In the particular case of PC the structure is language and an associated process is speech (with the associated mental processes). The problem I have is that it is not altogether clear whether "phatic" refers to a function (of speech) or a structure (of language). Are words phatic or the sentence uttered? This has quote heavy consequences for how to study the phenomenon, and in my opinion partly responsible for the great variability of opinion on the matter.

A social structure is an arrangement of persons in relationships defined and regulated by institutions; and an institution is an established pattern of conduct, or a set of patterns, relating to some feature of social life. The process that is connected with social structure is social life, the interactions and joint actions of persons who are brought into relation by the structure. The concept of function, as I employ it, is used to describe the discoverable interconnections of the social structure and the processes of social life. The social life is determined by the structure; the structure is maintained in existence by the social life, or undergoes modification through the events of the social life (such as a war, for example). The function of an institution, custom or belief, or of some regular social activity, such as a funeral ceremony, or the trial and punishment of a criminal, lies in the effect it has in the complex whole of social structure and the process of social life. (Radcliffe-Brown: 322)

Somehow I've come to detest all too clean theoretical constructs. This is a perfect example - everything is set in neat order that sweeps over every reality by a reasoned way reality is supposed to be simplified. Don't even have words to discuss what's wrong with such paragraphs as I've collected above and attributed to cybernetics and organicism.

It is worth while to point out that names ending in -ism do not apply to scientific theories, but do apply to philosophical doctrines. There are such things as socialism and utilitarianism, and also Platonism, Hegelianisms and Marxism. Chemists work on the basis of the atomic theory, but no one calls their theory "atomism" though this may be an appropriate name for the philosophy of Democritus. By calling his doctrine [|] "functionalism" Malinowski seems to have wished to emphasize that it was the product of one mind, like any philosophical doctrine, not, like a scientific theory, the product of the co-operative thinking of a succession of scientists. Might it not prevent confusion if it were renamed Malinowskianism? (Radcliffe-Brown: 322-323)

Malinowskianism works for me because "phatic communion" is definitely a creation of one mind in direct opposition with others. I already do my best to keep distinct Malinowskian and Jakobsonian linguistic functionalisms.

Goldstein, Leon J. 1957. The Logic of Explanation in Malinowskian Anthropology. Philosophy of Science 24(2): 156-166.

They have been all too ready to cite the vague programmatic pronouncements in which Malinowski's writings abound, while seemingly oblivious to the fact that with rare exception every major attempt by Malinowski to account systematically for some kind of sociocultural phenomena reveals one and the same pattern of explanation. And it is this pattern alone which may be spoken of as Malinowski's method of functional analysis. (Goldstein 1957: 156)

I've noticed several distinct patterns (obsessive empiricism, attribution of futility, patent contrarianism, etc.).

Antecedent to any given event is a chaotic wealth of other events, and when a scholar selects some one or more and claims that it or they have been causally efficacious in the development of the event to be explained, implicit in his selection is some system of theory which makes some things relevant and others not. It is desirable that the theoretical basis of the explanation be made explicit, for this would reduce the risk of subjectivity in the selection of causes. (Goldstein 1957: 158)

The most maddening thing about Malinowski is that he does rely on theories but doesn't state clearle what they are and where they can be consulted. Source-working him is a series of lucky chances. Subjective selection seems to be the essence of the terminological demon.

Inasmuch as the term "sociocultural system" need not mean anything more than a system defined by the variables of some theory in social science, there need to be no fear that such a program presupposes a methodologically dubious holism. (Goldstein 1957: 158; footnote 8)

Phrase for Mal's major criticism of Durkheim.

Thus Professor Lowie observes, "We take for granted that all forms of marriage have some connection with sex. What we want to know is why the Toda practice polyandry, the Bantu polygyny, the Hopi monogamy; and that cannot be explained in terms of generic human tendencies." (Goldstein 1957: 159)

I think "the well-known tendency" and "the fundamental tendency" (PC 3.2-3) can be safely assumed to be part of the common sense knowledge of things. But he doesn't explain it, give any details, or point to how to study it. I read this paper in last August, so moving on.

Kimpel, Ben 1968. The Contradictory Aspect of Malinowski's Analyses of Religious Rites. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 7(2): 259-271.

These two interpretations are contradictory in theri analyses of religious rites. Frazer maintains that religious rites refer beyond themselves, and in this sense, they perform a referential or instrumental function. Ogden and Richards maintain that religious rites do not refer beyond themselves, but are "ends in themselves," and in this sense, they are not instrumental, but are purely expressive or emotive. (Kimpel 1968: 259)

Finally someone is dealing with the peripatetic triad! Haven't read Frazer yet, not sure if he has something like instrumental or referential functions or if these are "read into" it from Ogden and Richards, who themselves employ self-consummation, reflexivity, autonomy, futility. Purely expressive or emotive is how La Barre reads it.

He characterizes magic as "invariably pragmatic action in speech and ritual." He declares that it is "a practical art consisting of acts which are only means to a definite end," whereas religion is "a body of self-contained acts being themselves the fulfillment of their purpose." This twofold set of categories is also proposed by Ogden and Richards. They characterize religion as having "no concern with [...] direct reference." Since its sole function is emotive or evocative, they maintain that "what it does, or should do, is to induce a fitting attitude to experience." By this they mean that the sole function of language in religion is expressing "attitudes, moods, desires, feelings, emotions." (Kimpel 1968: 259)

Finally something gives reinforcement for the belief that PC was meant as a sort of "secular ritual". [Aside: Arvo Valton's "an hour with a militant atheist" (1968). Is "pragmatic action" Malinowski's own designation for futility? Because that is what he seems to pull here. Taken in conjunction with Mahaffy's art of conversation, primitive speech is not an "art" in this sense because it's rather natural, like an "innate tendency". Still I don't get how "It is obvious that the outer situation does not enter directly into the technique of speaking" (PC 7.3)? - Sources: "self-contained acts" from MaSciRe, p. 81, also "the aim of which is achieved in their very performance" (p. 52); "fitting attitude" (atmosphere!) from TMoM, p. 158.

But the identification of the instrumental function with magic, and the identification of a strictly noninstrumental function with religious rites, are of a very different order, and may be regarded as arbitrary. In fact, it is as arbitrary as are definitions, since the criteria on the basis of which he distinguishes magical and religious rites are definitions. He characterizes "the magic art" as one which is "directed towards the attainment of practical aims." He characterizes a "religious ceremony" as one in which "there is no clear purpose directed toward a subsequent event." (Kimpel 1968: 260)

Futile = non-utilitarian; self-contained = noninstrumental. Subsequent event in MSR, p. 87. An intended or desired subsequent event is what makes pseudo-social interaction pseudo-.

Whereas definition, expansion of definition, and classification by definition are defensible procedures, the classification of behaviors by such definition is a very different order of procedure, and it is open to question. Whereas specifying a definition is a purely linguistic operation, classifying observable practices is not exclusively a linguistic procedure. (Kimpel 1968: 260)

Wow. I'm currently working on expansion (giving context), but this is where my philological/linguistic tricks should come at an end. At best I could give examples of one trope or another being important for some strand of research or other, at worst I'd be muddling the clarity and point of my close reading. Ideally, I'm giving advice on what practices to classify as "phatic" and laying bare characteristics by which classification could proceed. Clearly you have to have a more-or-less clear understanding of what you're classifying before you do so.

Yet he also acknowledges that "all pragmatic concerns (in primitive life) combine physiological drive and emotional response with intellectual interest." He likewise does not ignore the so-called "intellectual" aspect of narrative speech when he says that in such language "there is [...] (both) intellectual and emotional attitudes of those present." (Kimpel 1968: 261)

Again, wow. This triad comes from Freedom and Civilization (p. 206) and the attitudes of those present from "Supp. p. 312".

Since all rites perform an emotive function or express emotions, the distinction between magical and religious rites on the basis of their emotive or nonemotive functions is questionable procedure. It is questionable on the ground on the emotional element in all rituals. It is furthermore questionable on the ground of Malinowski's own position that there is no fundamental difference between the "spontaneous ritual [...] of overflowing passion," which may be classified as "religious," and the "traditionally fixed magical ritual," since he himself says, "they are not independent of each other." (Kimpel 1968: 261)

Imagine the following definition of the phatic function: "it is a non-emotive, non-instrumental, and non-referential use of language" (I was tip-toe'ing over there between conative, practical, and instrumental; and it made me realize that the odd "what happens linguistically" may amount to non-representational, since the aim is not to arouse reflexion - that is, presentation of mental images and analysis - in the listener). The ending quote, from Sex and Repression, p. 177, hints that the relation between formulaic words (sociabilities) and meaningless sentences (a flow of language) is that "they are not independent of each other". This is essentially a statement about automatization/mechanization.

Another reference to the cognitive and so nonemotive aspect of religion is made by Malinowski when he says that "Religion [...] reveals (to man) his God or his gods." This way of interpreting a function of religion is inconsistent with Ogden and Richards' definition ecause it regards this aspect as presumably instructive or informative, and so as presumably cognitive. (Kimpel 1968: 261)

Although this is the exact kind of searching-for-analogies that I need to do (hopefully not too much), this one seems like a stretch because it hinges on one's understanding of what a God is or gods are (the essence of god may be an emotion, not information; on the whole it is "indescribable"). This is another way of saying that just like I don't very much enjoy the confusion that sometimes ensues when someone looks at something noncommunicative through a communication model, this is taking the categories of signs (specifically functions of language or speech) and tacking them on to experience. Note that the author did not clearly define the triad's constituents himself in the beginning but began operating with them right away - this I believe to be a mistake I should avoid myself. (If I'm going to yank all three of the stool's legs off I'd better have enough space to explain why they're even there and what they are.)

Desire and its concomitants of feeling, passion, emotion, are basic to ideas which, in turn, are basic to religious rituals. Malinowski accounts for religious ideas or beliefs as basically emotive responses to no reality other than man's own desires or wants. (Kimpel 1968: 261)

This seems to hold in Allport's quote (above) and in Prohvet Maltsvet (Viiding 1958), where it is the peasant desire to remove themselves from their over-taxing dutites before the local barons. Essentially this is the description of the issue Malinowski takes with Durkheim's view of the origin of religious ideas in public speaking and common sentiments (in Giddings, desires massed and generalized).

Without doubt, one element likewise in public celebration is festive; and Malinowski describes such an aspect of public activities when he speaks of "periodical feasts [...] with rejoicing and festive apparel, with an abundance of food." He describes "such feasts" as "allow[ing] the people to indulge in their gay mood, to enjoy the abundance of crops [...] to muster the whole community in full force, and to do all this in a mood of happiness and harmony." (Kimpel 1968: 262)

"Ludic", which I've sometimes used for playfulness is not a good candidate. Even "festive" is perhaps too strong to pair with "futile". A "mood of happiness and harmony" (MSR, pp. 54) sounds awfully lot like his atmospheres.

But if Ogden and Richards' scheme were to have been used consistently by Malinowski, he would have classified very little of Trobriand culture as "religious." The reason that he classifies so much of it as "religious" is that he does not conform to Ogden and Richards' definition of "religion." (Kimpel 1968: 265)

The problem is, Malinowski was studying and thinking about religious rituals at least a decade before Ogden and Richards published TMoM. But I would find it even ill-advised to use Ogden and Richards' scheme too consistently because it's only one version of such triadic schemes, and the influences of Peirce and Bühler are not (yet?) clear in this regard. The very best source to look to is either Aristotle or The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

El-Shamy, Hasan M. 1974. On Darwinian Psychological Anthropology. Current Anthropology 15(1): 90-92.

Relatively lately, in their search for more encompassing answers to extremely intricate culture questions, students have turned to the application of various theoretical and methodological frameworks from different fields, seeking to integrate them into one system. When reverting to a theory that has suffered loss of popularity, however, they tend to pick it up where others left off. As a result, they usually face the pitfall that led to the abandonment of that train of thought in the first place. (El-Shamy 1974: 90)

Emphasized the feeling encroaching upon these readings, as many seem to have stumbled upon the very same pitfalls that I have, and it may become difficult to draw the line between my own unique criticisms and those pointed out better elsewhere. With Kimpel, for example, I can say that he is one of the very few people I've seen taking Ogden and Richards seriously, yet I do not feel that he has done with Malinowski's "religious" what I intend to do with "phatic". There is yet hope that I can even lead the train through where others dropped off.

A more critical issue is the author's conception of motivation, a factor essential to all behavioristic frameworks, theoretical or procedural; it is the raison d'être for any activity. (El-Shamy 1974: 90)

Thus, the "raison d'être [...] of such phrases as 'How do you do?'" (PC 2.4) is simply begging the question of the motivation of greetings. (Is it propitiation?) I finally have a chance to point out that the examples in PC 2.4 are all from, apparently upper-class, British society and only one is attributed to the natives is "Whence comest thou?" ("Where do you come from?" in Shakespearean diction, for god knows what reason), which may be taken in at least two ways: as a "national character" elucidation, i.e. where are you from? and the other from an incident in Malinowski's Argonauts when a chief is questioning some men on a kula quest and asking them where they came from as in where their last landing was, e.g. which way they came (cf. Dorothy Lee's 1950. analysis of their spacial organization; they also travel "in bumps").

Malinowski, whom the author mentions once (casually, in paretheses), introduced the term "drive" and "Need" in their behavioristic learning context and used them interchangeably to formulate a "scientific theory of culture" (Malinowski 1944). Malinowski was under the direct influence of Hull's learning theory, probably through the then follower of Hull, Neal E. Miller, under whom Malinowski had studied "psychology for non-psychologists." (El-Shamy 1974: 90)

More sources crop up. Neal E. Miller was born in 1909 and does not appear to have started publishing before 1940.

Barkow's "biosocial approach" is an anti-Malinowski Malinowskian approach (another contradiction) masked in more timely parlance borrowed from the engineering field of cybernetics [...] (El-Shamy 1974: 91)

I'd laugh if this wasn't where my own work seems to lead up to.

Hsu, Francis L. K. 1977. Role, Affect, and Anthropology. American Anthropologist 79(4): 805-808.

Malinowski himself seemed to have supplied the key to it later in the diary (1967: 167):
As for ethology: I see the life of the natives as utterly devoid of interest or importance, something as remote from me as the life of a dog. During the walk, I made it a point of honor to think about what I am here to do. About the need to collect many documents. I have a general idea about their life and some acquaintance with their language, and if I somehow "document" all this, I'll have valuable material. - Must concentrate on my ambition and work to some purpose.
Malinowski differed from the American woman in that he collected more systematic information about what the natives did and the material world they lived in. But what he and she shared was the lack of truly human relations with the natives - the Chinese or the Trobrianders. (Hsu 1977: 806)

This is an impression I share. By all I've gathered it looks like Malinowski was after "documents" (magical lore) without engaging with the native in a generally human way, as an equal.

What do we mean by truly human relations? I suggest truly human relations are characterized by affect (or feeling) in contrast to the not-so-human relations, characterized by role (or usefulness). (Hsu 1977: 806)

In true PC we don't have "roles" beyond the technical turn-taking roles of pseaker and listener. Pseudo-social intercourse on the other hand involves a role, or even a Goffmanian "face".

Role activities may get us riches and fame but affect patterns determine how well we enjoy the riches and the fame, and the meaning of our work and our very existence. Machines increasingly replace humans as role performers. But who and how many among us accept robots as mates, friends, or parents? (Hsu 1977: 806)

What robots did you have in the 1970s? But the sentiment rings relevant enough: if role activities lead to monies and these are taken over by machines, no more monies for humans. Something universal or basic should be done about it.

Why do we still so freely use the word "primitive," referring not only to economics and technology but to nearly everything else in most of the Third World? Is it not because we cannot modify our feeling of superiority deeply ingrained in the Western mind? (Hsu 1977: 807)

Phraseology for what Malinowski was perhaps attempting to do in his remarks about the loaded word "savage". Also by the same author:

Hsu, Francis L. K. 1979. The Cultural Problem of the Cultural Anthropologist. American Anthropologist 81(3): 517-532.

What can we learn from Malinowski's reaction to his field context? [...] In spite of his hostility toward Christian missionaries, Malinowski's sense of racial and cultural superiority over the natives in his field came through loud and clear. He frankly called them savages, niggers, boys, not once but repeatedly. I have counted some 69 entries in which he expressed various degrees of aversion toward them, from irritation to anger to hatred. (Hsu 1979: 518)

My question here is rather particular: could his own "degree of aversion" towards the natives have inspired the concept of PC? From Mahaffy's book he collected social vices and then explained that this is not only how "savage" people speak but also how "primitive mind[s]" in civilized countries speak.

But the ratio between the unfavorable entries and favorable ones and other evidence do not support the idea that Malinowski ever felt genuine friendship in the affective sense for any of the natives. [...] Second, while he made numerous records of having breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and teas and whites, including the governor of New Guinea and his wife, missionaries, traders, and other officials, he scarcely ever mentioned sharing meals with any native. (Hsu 1979: 519)

No communion of food for Malinowski.

Yet, in spite of his lack of positive feeling for the natives, he unrealistically expected some natives to have positive feelings toward him:
Goyama; I gave him some tobacco; he cadges more [...] Knows nothing about Vakuta. With his doglike face, Goyama amuses and attracts me. His feelings for me are utilitarian rather than sentimental (pp. 142-143; emphasis in original).
It is in this context of his aversion to "inferior natives" (in his view) with whom he had to deal often that we can understand why Malinowski devoted so much space in his diary to the wonders of nature. To concentrate on things was one ways of escaping from the hated human connections. (Hsu 1979: 519)

In the diary entry we have a recognition of pseudo-sociability. This may have contributed to his denial of "common sentiments". Genuine human connections are sentimental, yet when describing "the direct aim of binding hearer to speaker" the operative term is a flippant "some social sentiment or other" (PC 7.8).

Symmons-Symonolewicz, Konstantin 1958. Bronisław Malinowski: An Intellectual Profile. The Polish Review 3(4): 55-76.

He attracted people not only by the superior qualities of his mind: brilliance, originality, subtlety, insight, imagination but also by such personal characteristics as sincerity, generosity, kindness, informal manner, and, according to some who knew him well, lack of conceit. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 56)

In line with his own view of the world (sincerity).

There were, however, in his personality also some other traits that were bound to increase the number of his "unfriends." As R. Firth explains:
His intolerance of what he considered sham or insincerity, his impatience with criticism that he did not think was based on loyalty, his tenderness towards personal slights and his relative insecurity to the effects of his exuberance towards others all tended to arouse hostility.
The polemical exchanges in which he engaged frequently could have no cathartic effect because Malinowski, as Richards puts it, "was a man whose expressions became more extreme with opposition and the language he used in controversy was bound to provoke opposition." (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 57)

Likewise.

During his life-time, Malinowki was accused of considerable vanity, "overexuberant optimism regarding the uniqueness of his views," and the unwillingness to acknowledge the priority of others. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 57)

I'm not surprised. him "tell[ing] his students that the older literature was more or less useless" (infra, 57) is also perfectly congenial to his leaving out references and only mentioning a succesion of names ever so often, all while implicitly carrying forward a host of older theories. An idea popped up: it might make for an interesting exercise to construct a vain straw-man to defend his borrowings and transformations against those sources from the material of later writers who take to Malinowski somewhat naively.

As Leach says:
Malinowski had many qualities of a prophet, he was a "charismatic" leader and such men always expresse their creed in slogans, which have a certain characteristic quality. These slogans assert in a clear-cut but crassly oversimplified form of state of affairs which their followers would all like to be true. Malinowski's thesis that cultures are functionally integrated is no more true, empirically speaking, than Hitler's thesis that Germans are the master race, but both assertions could be true and both appeal to their respective adherents for somewhat similar reasons - they express a Utopian state of affairs.
The same kind of resentment [...] is expressed by another former student of Malinowski, M. Fortes, when he states:
He could not shake off the compulsion to present his theories and his ethnographic [|] discoveries in the form of an assault on the ancien régime. It drove him to wrap up some of his most original ideas and observations in laboured paradoxes and prolix repetition.
When Fortes speaks of a "histrionic streak" in Malinowski, he points out one more important trait of his personality by which he was prone to make some enemies. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 58-59)

The intuitiveness of definition; the phantom of collective consciousness in the integration of culture, and the assault on Mahaffy's theory of conversation embodied in PC.

A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who had a personal stake in the matter, saw in this tendency of Malinowski to misrepresent the views of his opponents a very essential trait of his polemical technique:
Professor Malinowski on occasion indulges in the amusement of setting up a straw-man for the pleasure of making fun of it and demolishing it. Sometimes he named his straw-man "Emile Durkheim."
(Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 62)

This would make sense, for he appears to have taken the points of contention in his review of Durkheim in 1913 at the very least up to 1923, when he basically constructed Phatic Communion to discredit Durkheim, who appears to have a more complex and subtle approach than comes off from Malinowski's explicit criticism and implicit use.

He reprimanhs R. Fortune for his mild "terminological neophily," and yet fields to his own "demon of terminological invention" on practically every occasion, etc., etc. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 65)

Nice. From Fortune's Sorcerers of Dobu (1932). Note that in "actuated by the demon of terminological invention", the demon comes from Durkheim and actuation from Frazer.

Kluckhohn suggested also that in the later part of his career Malinowski's reading was limited. This was recently corroborated in part by Firth who pointed out, however, that it was Malinowski's practice "to have works read to and discussed with him." (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 67)

I was quite perturbed when my own former supervisor said casually that he no longer needs to read books. Then I myself had a long bout of reading nearly no books, only articles, and felt it to be perfectly justified. Now, having returned to books, I cannot overemphasize how much more valuable a book can be as compared to the same volume in articles.

Kluckhohn also spoke of Malinowski's ability "to communicate a sense of adventure in even his most technical writing," of his "dramatization of field-work," and of his gift for popularization. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 68)

I'm still on the fence on whether or how to employ narrative style in my own rather technical output.

The same criticism was recently made by M. Fortes who observed that Malinowski had a tendency not only to repeat the same hypotheses, but even to illustrate his point by using "the same handful of dramatic cases." (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 68; footnote 56)

One way to go about narrativization would be to "open up" the representative anecdotes more systematically, to demonstrate the inconsistencies by example. Though I'm afraid that it might end up looking like the free manipulation of the dramatic case found in modern pragmatics (e.g. Paula and Arthur in the Relevance Theory approach to phatic implications).

As for his qualities as a teacher, his students assert in unison that these were truly outstanding. His love of teaching, genuine interest in his students, generosity in giving his time and attention to their problems, and an unusual capacity for friendship and sympathy, made him a true friend and a father-figure to his pupils, while his zest for work, critical acumen and ability to encourage even the most inhibited among them, assured a high degree of classroom participation. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1958: 72)

It would appear that he took Mahaffy's theory of conversation to heart, just didn't passy any of the good stuff along. I think one of the crucial aims of my work at this point, after the Mahaffian revelation, is to place the good into PC, of not for context then for encouragement for those modern who do take to the hidden good in it.

Symmons-Symonolewicz, Konstantin 1959. Bronisław Malinowski: Formative Influences and Theoretical Evolution. The Polish Review 4(4): 17-45.

In experimental psychology he worked under Wilhelm Wundt, who exerted a strong influence upon him and whose interests in cultural anthropology must have strengthened Malinowski's desire to devote himself entirely to the scientific study of human society, even though he might have been repelled by the "group-mind" implications of Wundt's folk psychology. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 19)

Thus, the objection against collective consciousness may involve Wundt as well. Am I up for Wundt?

In 1940 and 1941, Malinowski made his last field trips, studying economic and social conditions in some districts of Mexico. [↩] In February, 1942, he was appointed to the Chair of Cultural Anthropology at Yale and it looked as if he was going to begin another fruitful period of scientific activity. [↩] But on May 16 of the same year after delivering an address at the inaugural meeting of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in New York, of which he was elected the President, he was stricken by a heart attack and died in his home in New Haven. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 23)

An inchoate idea for a short story would be one that includes poisoning at this meeting, and instead of dying he goes on to synthesize the views of his latest writings into a comprehensive new theory. By the looks of it, at least, he formulated his theory at London, then had two decades of productive work with it, and began synthesizing a new view that didn't quite stick because it wasn't ready. Footnote reads: "The text of this address was reprinted recently in The Polish Review", in an issue containing several papers on Conrad.

C. Kluckhohn, e.g., described Malinowski's conceptual genealogy as "exceptionally hybrid." It included, according to him,
the French sociology, various anthropologists, [Alexander] Shand's doctrine of the sentiments, and bits of Pavlov and radical behaviorism, Ogden and Richards, and many other lines of influence.
Other critics were even more concise in their observations. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: QCQC)

What is this now?

Leach turns rather abruptly to his main thesis that Malinowski's basic theoretical outlook was rooted in the pragmatic philosophy o William James:
For on the one hand Wundt was an objective empiricist, the founder of the science of experimental psychology, while on the other he was an evolutionist of the old school, who, in his anthropological studies, threw especial emphasis on the study of language upon the unitary personality of the tribe as a whole. Malinowski, I suggest, approved of Wundt's empiricism but was repelled by the 'group mind' implications of his historicist approach. [...] It was precisely in the period around 1910, when Malinowski first came to England to study sociology under Westermarck and Hobhouse, that James' philosophy had its maximum vogue, and it is at this period that Malinowski is most likely to have been receptive to the ideas of the English-speaking world.
(Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 25)

My collection of quotes on the subject of "national character" give a much more complex picture of first denoncing group mind and it then slowly creeping into his own general assumptions. On the whole this passage is a valuable road-sign as to where to begin with pragmaticism. If my end-goal is an amalgamation of Peirce and Malinowski, then James can't hurt (too much) in between.

Leach's discovery of Malinowski's theoretical affinities with the pragmatists is not really new. A similar attempt to relate his theoretical framework to American philosophical pragmatism through his allegedly close ties with American functional psychology was made some time ago by the anthropologist [Robert Bradford] Fox in his unpublished M. A. thesis: Bronisław Malinowski: A Critical Analysis (University of Texas, 1944). Fox specifically denied that Malinowski's functionalism was influenced by Durkheim and tried instead to prove that it was derived from the writings of Dewey and Mead. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 26; footnote 52)

Fuel for time-travel paranoia.

However, almost from the beginning of his contacts with the contributions of the French sociological school, Malinowski had two serious questions about its attitude toward psychology. Some of the psychological concepts of the school such as "collective consciousness" or "collective representations" seemed to him "metaphysical" in character, i.e., devoid of any discoverable empirical basis. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 32)

Already all too familiar.

In his book, The Family Among the Australian Aborigines, he makes use of such Durkheimian concepts as "collective ideas" and "collective mind," but states emphatically that his use of such expressions "does not postulate the existence of any metaphysical entity [...] independent of any human brains." He explains that such a concept as "collective mind" is for him "an abbreviation for denoting the ensemble of "collective ideas" and 'collective feelings,' i.e., such mental facts as are peculiar to a certain society, and at the same time embodied in and expressed by its institutions. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 33)

His rejection is not complete: "in one way the whole substance of my theory of culture [...] consists in reducing Durkheimian theory to terms of Behavioristic psychology" (Coral Gardens, vol. II, p. 236).

For example, Malinowski's concern with some unformalized aspects of social behavior among the Trobrianders should probably be attributed, in part at least, to the stimulating influence of Freudian theories. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 34)

Any examples? No? Okay. "Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead in the Trobriand Islands".

Cf. G. Gorer, "The Concept of National Character," Personality in Nature, Society and Culture, ed. by c. Kluckhohn and H. A. Murray, 2nd ed., New York, 1953, p. 250. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 34)

Damn you, Konstantin, and your interesting but inaccessible obscure sources!

To be sure in his criticism of psychoanalytic theories, Malinowski made use of the contributions of both Gestaltists and behaviorists, but his main theoretical orientation was provided by an early socio-psychological approach of McDougall and Shand. In his review of McDougall's Group Mind, although rejecting the central conception of the book as "a survival of Hegelian theory," he stressed that
[...] McDougall was one of the first clearly to appreciate that in problems of social belief, custom, and behavior it is sentiment and instinct which play a paramount part. Modern research has vindicated this doctrine, in some cases not without exaggeration. I think that I am safe in predicting that in the future ethnology will be even more influenced by McDougall's views than is the case at present.
Six years later, in Sex and Repression in Savage Society, Malinowski states explicitly that a large part of his theoretical argument, as presented in this book, is based on the "Shandian principles," while in one of his later works he describes "the theory of sentiments propounded by Shand and McDougall" as "the most important contribution to modern [|] psychology." After this the theory quietly disappears from Malinowski's writings inasmuch as he becomes more and more interested in the concept of needs rather than that of sentiments. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 40-41)

I have William McDougall's The Group Mind (1920) on disk. But who is this Shand?

In dealing with people of a different culture, it is always dangerous to use the short-circuit of "empathy," which usually amounts to guessing as to what the other person might have thought or felt. The fundamental principle of the field-worker, as well as of the behaviorist, is that ideas, emotions, and conations never continue to lead a cryptic, hidden existence within the unexplorable depths of the mind, conscious or unconscious.
(Malinomski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, p. 23; in Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 41)

A bit ironic, considering that the rationale for PC stems from the explicit negation of sharing ideas, emotions, and conations, that is, guessing that the other person is not thinking or feeling the same.

J. Firth pointed out recently that the concept of "situation," crucial for Malinowski's linguistic apprach, was suggested to him by Ph. Wegener's Situation-theorie which was one of the books which Malinowski studied. [...] For an evaluation of Malinowski's contributions to linguistics cf. somewhat discordant views of: E. D. Chapple and C. S. Coon, Principles of Anthropology, New York, 1942; Kluckhohn, Journal of American Folklore, LVI, 1943; Fox, Bronisław Malinowski; C. F. voegelin and z. S. Harris, "The Scope of Linguistics," American Anthropologist, XLIX, 1947, pp. 588-600; R. Pieris, "Speech and Society: A Sociological Approach by Language," American Sociological Review, XVI, 1951, pp. 499-505; J. B. Carrol, The Study of Language, Cambridge, Mass., 1953; and H. Hackett, "Bronisław Malinowski," Word Study, XXXII, 1956, No. 2, pp. 1-4. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1959: 43)

Lord have mercy. There's decades of work ahead.

Symmons-Symonolewicz, Konstantin 1960a. Bronisław Malinowski: Individuality as a Theorist. The Polish Review 5(1): 53-65.

[...] the fact that most of his writings dealt with the society of the Trobriand Islanders and that his theoretical constructions were based mainly on his data from this one culture. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1960a: 56)

At least in the case of PC this is patently untrue.

Similarly, in his first, little known, articles in English, "The Economic Aspect of the Intichiuma Ceremonies," Malinowski dealt with a theoretical problem which was to become later the basic premise of his functional approach, namely with the relations between such social institutions as economic activities and magic. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1960a: 58)

Not an entry in the bibliography I found somewhere. Is there a comprehensive bibliography somewhere online like there is for Jakobson? There's an online list of his manuscripts, though, with references to his early reviews. Ideally, I would like to read everything he published before 1923.

As early as 1911, in his first longer article, in Polish, he wrote:
The fewer hypothetical assumptions and propositions are involved in a given description of facts, the greater is its vaule, but inasmuch as every accurate description of facts requires exact concepts and these may be provided only by a theory, every description and classification must of necessity be based on a theoretical foundation.
His experience in the field did not change this strong conviction about the basic importance of theory in the observation and description of facts. (Symmons-Symonolewicz 1960a: 59)

The instinct of sociability is a pretty grand hypothetical assumption, as are all three of his wobbly stoor-legs.

Symmons-Symonolewicz, Konsantin 1960b. The Origin of Malinowski's Theory of Magic. The Polish Review 5(4): 36-44.

The discussion of the origin of religion begins with a critical survey of various theories in which Malinowski rejects the rationalistic approach to the religious phenomena and points out the significance of emotions as a source of religion.
Man, especially primitive man who lives in a constant struggle for survival, cannot be and is not a reasonable and reasoning being [...] His life is mainly emotional and active, full of emotions and passions, and it is these elements that shape his whole behavior, and not a philosophical reflection [...] Primitive man has urgent strong needs, constant, sometimes dangerous, vital pursuits, and it is easy to show that these very elements lead him to the performance of such acts and activities which constitute a germ of religion. (Malinowski, Primitive Religion, pp. 46-47)
(Symmons-Symonolewicz 1960b: 40)

Congruous with Spencer (violent passions), and denial of reflection (primitive man is no great metaphysician).

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