Series Strangers Abroad, Programme 4
Director André Singer, Bruce Dakowski (writer and presenter)
Country/Production UK
Release 1986
Length 52 mins
Format Colour / DVD or VHS / PAL or NTSC / All region
Location various
Comments Special price for series, 6 for 5
Order No RAI-200.278
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Central Television’s major documentary series looks at the first anthropologists to stop ‘armchair theorising’ and go out to live among the peoples who so interested them.
Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski was born into an aristocratic family in Poland in 1984. It was the chance reading of Frazer's Golden Bough that put him on the path of his future career. He pursuit anthropological training at London School of Economics and was awarded a doctorate for work on Australian Aborigines, based on data provided by Spencer and Gillen. Following a first field study among the Mailu off the New Guinea cost, using the well-tested formula of his predecessors, Spencer and Rivers, he moved 1915 to the Trobriands. There he abandoned the veranda and developed his style of fieldwork, which came to be called participant-observation: speaking the language, living in the community and becoming part of it, making a detailed record of all aspects of native life. Malinowski's intimate experience with Trobriand society generated a growing awareness of the myriad of links that hold society together.
