Etnologia i sztuka. Obrazy w monografiach Bronisława Malinowskiego

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to look at the work of the eminent ethnologist Bronisław Malinowski as a creation of images. In this essay his work is treated as a collection of images with a strictly European provenance. Examples of such images could be depictions of the places where the Polish ethnologist conducted his research. These depictions are, in fact, maps which he created by means of words. The images are like painted descriptions of tropical nature or, as Malinowski himself said, cinematic representations of the everyday life of the natives from the Trobriand Islands; they are people’s portraits created by verbal descriptions, numerous photographs and also specifically “modernist” visual forms, such as tables, graphs, diagrams etc. The European nature of these images confirms the hypothesis that the phenomenon described, rather infelicitously, as primitivism, of which ethnology represented by the second generation of field-working ethnologists, to which Malinowski belonged, is a construct created by a strictly European imagination.