Monthly Archives: August 2024

Malinowski’s “new science” of culture (part 2)

The problem we are facing here (…) is the fundamental problem of each science: the establishment of identity of its phenomena.1 That this problem still awaits its solution, and that the science of culture still lacks real criteria of identification — that is, criteria of what to observe and how to observe, what to compare and how to carry it out, of what to trace in evolution and diffusion — will hardly be disputed by anyone acquainted with the controversies of history2…  (69-70)3

Whether we consider a very simple or primitive culture or an extremely complex and developed one, we are confronted by a vast apparatus, partly material, partly human4 and partly spiritual, by which man is able to cope with the concrete, specific problems that face him. (36)

Again, in his whole outfit of artifacts and his ability to produce them and to appreciate them, man creates a secondary environment. (…) This environment, which is neither more nor less than culture itself, has to be permanently reproduced, maintained, and managed. (…) Cultural tradition has to be transmitted from each generation to the next. Methods and mechanisms of an educational character must exist (…) All these primary problems of human beings are solved for the individual by artifacts, organization into cooperative groups, and also by the [ongoing] development of knowledge (…) these new needs impose upon man and society a secondary type of determinism. (36-38)

We shall be able to reject the view that “No common measure of cultural phenomena can be found” (…) [Instead,] the scientific analysis of culture (…) can point to another system of realities that also5 conforms to general laws, and can thus be used as a guide for field-work, as a means of identification of cultural realities, and as the basis of social engineering.6 (38)

Unless the anthropologist and his fellow humanists agree on what is the definite isolate in the concrete cultural reality, there will never be any science of civilization. (39)

In order to understand [cultural] divergencies, a clear, common measure of comparison is indispensable.7 (40)

in any (…) comparative research, the problem of identity first has to be faced and solved (43)

The concept of institution (…) is, I submit, the legitimate isolate of cultural analysis.8 (51)

Each institution, that is, organized type of activity, has a definite structure. In order to observe, understand, describe, and discourse theoretically upon an institution, it is necessary to analyze it in the manner here indicated, and in this manner only. This applies to field-work and to any comparative studies as between different cultures, to problems of applied anthropology and sociology, and indeed, to any scientific approach in matters where culture is the main subject matter. No element, “trait,” custom, or idea is defined or can be defined except by placing it within its relevant and real institutional setting. We are thus insisting that such institutional analysis is not only possible but indispensable. (54)

The institutional structure is universal throughout all cultures, and within each cultural manifestation…  (54)

[The prerequisite need is] to establish (…) that our institutional types are not arbitrary or fictitious, but represent clearly definable realities. (66)

All cultures have as their main common measure a set of institutional types…9     (67)

What still remains to be made clear is the relation between form and function. We have insisted that each scientific theory must start from and lead to observation. It must be inductive and it must be verifiable by experience. In other words, it must refer to human experiences which can be defined, which are (…) accessible to any and every observer, and which are recurrent, hence (…) predictive. All this means that, in the final analysis, every proposition of scientific anthropology10 has to refer to phenomena which can be defined by form, in the fullest objective sense of the term. (67)

At the same time, we also indicated that culture, as the handiwork of man and as the medium through which he achieves his ends — a medium which allows him to live (…) a medium which (…) allows him to create goods and values beyond his animal, organic endowment — that culture, in all this and through all this, must be understood as a means to an end, that is, instrumentally or functionally. Hence, if we are correct in both assertions, a (…) definition of the concept of form, of function, and of their relations, must be given.  (67-68)

No organized system of activities is possible without a physical basis and without the equipment of artifacts. (…) There is a constant interaction between the organism and the secondary milieu in which it exists, that is, culture. In short, human beings live (…) the result of an interaction between organic processes and man’s manipulation and re-setting of his environment.  (68)

The problem we are facing here (…) is the fundamental problem of each science: the establishment of identity of its phenomena. That this problem still awaits its solution, and that the science of culture still lacks real criteria of identification — that is, criteria of what to observe and how to observe, what to compare and how to carry it out, of what to trace in evolution and diffusion — will hardly be disputed by anyone acquainted with the controversies of history…11 (69-70)

For reasons theoretical and practical, anthropology, as the theory of culture, must establish a closer working cooperation with those natural sciences which can supply us with the specific answer to [some of] our problems.12 (79)

Form and function (…) are inextricably related to one another. It is impossible to discuss the one without taking account of the other. (83)

In every human society each impulse is remolded by tradition. It appears still in its dynamic form as a drive, but a drive modified, shaped, and determined by tradition. (85)

In short, it would be idle to disregard the fact that the impulse leading to the simplest physiological performance is as highly plastic and determined by tradition as it is ineluctable in the long run, because it is determined by physiological necessities. (…) Simple physiological impulses can not exist under conditions of culture. (87)

We must not forget biology, but we can not rest satisfied with biological determinism alone. (89)

This is the point in which the study of human behavior takes a definite departure from mere biological determinism. We have made this clear already in pointing out that within each vital sequence the impulse is refashioned or co-determined by cultural influences. (94)

It is always necessary in the integral definition (…) to determine (…) essential nature and relate to it the other subsidiary functions.13

And this really is the hallmark of scientific definition. It must principally be a call to a scientifically schematized and oriented observation of empirical fact.14 (115)

Culture supplies man with derived potentialities, abilities, and powers. This also means that the enormous extension in the range of human action, over and above innate abilities of the naked organism, imposes on man a number of limitations. In other words, culture imposes a new type of specific determinism on human behavior. (119)

If our concept of derived need or cultural imperative is correct, certain new types of behavior are implied in all cultural responses, which are as stringent and ineluctable as every vital sequence is in its own right. (120)

We have to show that man must economically cooperate, that he must establish and maintain order; that he must educate the new and growing organism of each citizen; and that he must somehow implement the means of enforcement in all such activities. We have to show how and where these activities come in and how they combine. Finally, in order to make the processes of derivation and the hierarchy of need clear, we shall have to show how economics, knowledge, religion and mechanisms of law, educational training and artistic creativeness are directly or indirectly related to the basic, that is, physiological needs.15 (120)

Can we say, however, that the submission to cultural rules is as absolute as the submission to biological determinism? Once we realize that dependence on the cultural apparatus, however simple or complex, becomes the conditio sine qua non, we see immediately that the failure in social cooperation or symbolic accuracy spells immediate destruction or long-run attrition in the plain biological sense. (121)

The moment that such [cultural] devices have been adopted, in order to enhance human adaptability to the environment, they also become necessary conditions for survival. And here we can enumerate, point for point, the [cultural] factors on which human dependence becomes as great as dependence on the execution of any biologically dictated vital sequences. (121)

Thus, the material equipment in its economic production and technical quality, the skills based on training, knowledge and experience, the rules of cooperation, and symbolic efficiency are one and all as indispensable under the ultimate sanction of the biological imperative of self-preservation as are any purely physiologically determined elements. (122)

We have (…) shown the process of derivation, and thus linked up the instrumental determinism of cultural activities with the basic source of this determinism, that is, biological requirements. (126)

Symbolism is an essential ingredient of all organized behavior; (…) it is a subject matter which can be submitted to observation and theoretical analysis (…) to the same extent to which we can observe material artifacts (…) or define the form of a custom. The central thesis here maintained is that symbolism, in its essential nature, is the modification of the original organism which allows the transformation of a physiological drive into a cultural value. (132)

The cultural equivalent of the vital sequence.16 (137)

The organism, in short, reacts to the instrumental elements [supplied by culture] with the same or at least similar appetitive force as it does to objects which reward it directly by physiological pleasure. We can define this strong and inevitable attachment of the organism to certain objectives, norms, or persons who are instrumental to the satisfaction of the organism’s need, by the term value, in the widest sense of the word. (138)

In reality, however, we have to remember always that the drive17 is integral18 and that it works right through the sequence, controlling all its phases. (140)

What we have defined as charter, that is, the traditionally established values, programs, and principles of organized behavior, correspond once more, fully and directly, to our concept of drive, insofar as this is culturally reinterpreted. This cultural reinterpretation, again, means that the drive operates in a two-fold manner, first by the establishment of the value of the [cultural]  apparatus, and (…) then by reappearing as (…) culturally determined [by that value matrix].19 (140)

The understanding of any cultural element must imply (…) the satisfaction of essential needs, whether these be basic, that is biological, or derived, that is, cultural.20 (142)

 

  1. “The first task of each science is to recognize its legitimate subject matter. It has to proceed to methods of true identification (…) of the relevant factors of its process” (14); “Unless the anthropologist and his fellow humanists agree on what is the definite isolate in the concrete cultural reality, there will never be any science of civilization” (39); “in any (…) comparative research, the problem of identity first has to be faced and solved” (43). Malinowski is clear: “the fundamental problem” or “first task” of anthropology as a “science of culture” still “awaits its solution” such that it “lacks real criteria of identification” of what it is. Of its reality. Hence, anthropology not only does not solve the world-historical crisis of nihilism, it itself remains subject to it and reinforces it — reinforces what negates it. ↩
  2. “The controversies of history” is Malinowski’s understated way of referring to the “nightmare” from which his contemporary, James Joyce, was also “trying to awake”, See note 11 below. ↩
  3. All otherwise unidentified page numbers in this post refer to Bronislaw Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, 1944. All bolding has been added. The first word of cited passages has been capitalized in cases where it is not capitalized in Malinowski’s text. ↩
  4. With ‘human’ here Malinowski appears to have meant ‘ideational’. ↩
  5. ‘Also’ — like the sciences of ‘first nature’. ↩
  6. ‘Social engineering’ has rightly become a term of abuse because of its inevitable failures when based on faulty intellectual and moral foundations. But since ‘social engineering’ is always going on, acknowledged or unacknowledged, the great need is for the correction of these foundations and, therefore, of the ‘social engineering’ ineluctably carried out on their basis. ↩
  7. Unfortunately, what is ‘indispensable’ remains missing: “this problem still awaits its solution (such) that the science of culture still lacks real criteria of identification” (69). See note 1 above. ↩
  8. “The legitimate isolate of cultural analysis” is a dual genitive, but first of all an objective genitive. That is, “cultural analysis” is itself a ‘product’ or ‘effect’ of a “legitimate isolate”, or isolates, expressing itself, or themselves, in it. ↩
  9. The multiplication of technical terms by Malinowski — ‘culture’, ‘institution’, ‘form’, ‘function’, ‘symbol’. ‘value’, ‘charter’ — is a sign that he was looking unsuccessfully for the “true identification” of the “legitimate subject matter” of his “new science”. These terms are cards his mind was shuffling in an attempt to find a formulation where ‘everything falls into place’. A generation after Malinowski’s death, McLuhan would supply insights Malinowski ran out of time to locate — especially the critical determination that a Scientific Theory of Culture would not be one more science along with the existing ones, but a new genus of sciences, one with a different elementary structure, the medium. ↩
  10. Dual genitive! ↩
  11. “The controversies of history”: Malinowski was writing in the first years of WW2 when Germany controlled all of Europe. He apparently used ‘controversies’ to cover horrendous conflicts like it and WW1 — to mention only the world wars fought in his lifetime. ↩
  12. This may be the sort of observation Lévi-Strauss saw as misdirected in Malinowski’s work (especially without the qualification added here of some of our problems). But it is clear that Malinowski saw culture as a separate domain from that of the physical material and that he did not think that the latter could ground the former: “Simple physiological impulses can not exist under conditions of culture” (87); “We must not forget biology, but we can not rest satisfied with biological determinism alone” (89); “the study of human behavior takes a definite departure from mere biological determinism” (94). ↩
  13. ‘Integral definition” is both complex and unified: “the drive is integral and (…) works right through the sequence, controlling all its phases (140); “the drive operates in a two-fold manner” (140). Hence Malinowski’s praise for “Frazer’s artistry and his love of the integral and the comprehensive” (114). ↩
  14. Thirty years later in his German language paper, ‘Gesetze der Medien — strukturelle  Annäherung‘ (Uterrichtswissenschaft, June, 1974) McLuhan would cite Nan Lin from The Study of Human Communication (1973): “The ultimate goal of science is to explain by means of a set of theories, events that are observed” (192). ↩
  15. Terms like “the processes of derivation” and “the hierarchy of need”, and especially “basic (…) physiological needs” seem to fall prey to the criticism of Malinowski by Lévi-Strauss: “I must say immediately that I have the greatest respect for him (Malinowski) and consider him a very great anthropologist, and I’m not at all deriding his contribution. But nevertheless the feeling in Malinowski was that the thought (…) of all the populations without writing which are the subject matter of anthropology was entirely (…) determined by the basic needs of life. If you know that a people, whoever they are, is determined by the bare necessities of living — finding subsistence, satisfying the sexual drives, and so on — then you can explain their social institutions, their beliefs, their mythology, and the like. This very widespread conception in anthropology generally goes under the name of functionalism” (Myth and Meaning, 1978). It is well to keep in mind, however, that Malinowski’s essay was written quickly when he was mortally ill. Note, for example, how a footnote on p80 refers to Dr. “A.I.” Richards and Dr. Margaret “Read”. A statement such as this referring to “basic, that is, physiological needs” might therefore be taken as needing qualification and perhaps rewriting, not as specifying Malinowski’s position regarding what is “basic” to a “scientific theory of culture”. And this especially when so much else in the essay differs from it. Furthermore, while it is of course true that a science like genetics presupposes the science of chemistry, and that the latter might therefore be thought in some ways to be more “basic” than genetics, it is also true that genetics is a science in its own right and that it in no way violates the laws of chemistry in being such. So with anthropology in relation to human “physiological needs”. Malinowski: “Simple physiological impulses can not exist under conditions of culture” (87); “The central thesis here maintained is that symbolism, in its essential nature, is the modification of the original organism which allows the transformation of a physiological drive into a cultural value” (132). Is this different from noting that genetics is the ‘modification’ of chemistry which ‘allows the transformation’ of physical material into information? ↩
  16. The terms ‘vital’ and ‘value’ are deeply ambiguous in Malinowski. The ‘vital’ is both “physiological” and the creativity that exceeds the physiological. ‘Value’ is both always already established in culture and the innovating act through which culture is reoriented. “The drive operates in a two-fold manner…” (140). ↩
  17. ‘The drive’ = McLuhan’s ‘extension’? ↩
  18. ‘Integral= McLuhan’s ‘inclusive’ or ‘electric’ = “the drive operates in a two-fold manner” (140). ↩
  19. There is a ‘knot in time’ here which is essential. Somehow from within a “culturally determined” situation (which characterizes all human beings from birth) an “establishment of (new) value’ can take place which fundamentally exceeds that “determined” situation. Hence the birth of sciences, as well as exceptional brilliance in the arts, crafts and practical pursuits like hunting. Malinowski in his essay on Frazer (included in A Scientific Theory Of Culture And Other Essays): “It is the pragmatic and intrinsic value of magic and religion which makes for their vitality and endurance” (191). ↩
  20. A fundamental question for Malinowski is whether he fully understood the great point made by Hegel in his ‘Vorrede’ to Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807): “Daß an jedem Falschen etwas Wahres sei -– in diesem Ausdrucke gelten beide, wie Öl und Wasser, die unmischbar nur äußerlich verbunden sind. Gerade um der Bedeutung willen, das Moment des vollkommenen Andersseins zu bezeichnen, müssen ihre Ausdrücke da, wo ihr Anderssein aufgehoben ist, nicht mehr gebraucht werden. So wie der Ausdruck der Einheit des Subjekts und Objekts, des Endlichen und Unendlichen, des Seins und Denkens usf. das Ungeschickte hat, daß Objekt und Subjekt usf. das bedeuten, was sie außer ihrer Einheit sind, in der Einheit also nicht als das gemeint sind, was ihr Ausdruck sagt…”. In regard to the relationship of the biological and the cultural considered by Malinowski in this passage, the question must be posed whether he saw how ‘the’ biological and ‘the’ cultural were fundamentally different when considered in or out of their relationship in a science of culture? The inauguration of that science turns on this question. The necessarily neutral stance of science is possible only when the ontology of its domain is first specified such that it is not bound to any pre-scientific acceptance of, for example, what ‘biology’ or ‘culture’ have been thought to be. Instead the claim of such a “new science’ must be that only now can it be understood what these really are. In this way, and in this way alone, controversies are removed from a realm of contention and instead are considered in a realm of demonstration. To compare, gold, silver, copper, tin and iron were ‘known’ thousands of years ago; but what they really are became known only with the advent of chemistry a little more than two centuries ago. More, what this chemical knowledge iyself really is, within which gold, silver, copper, tin and iron are demonstrably known, is the transformation of the entire world that occurred over these two centuries. In similar fashion, the meaning of a science of culture can and must be a further transformation of the world that would at last provide a demonstrable way of managing Malinowski’s “controversies of history” (69). ↩

Malinowski’s “new science” of culture (part 1)

The epigraph to Lévi-Strauss’ Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté (1949) is appropriate to Malinowski’s work as well:

The tendency of modern inquiry is more and more towards the conclusion that if law is anywhere, it is everywhere.
— E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 18711

*

In his posthumously published A Scientific Theory of Culture (1944), Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) describes the “new science”2 he envisioned as follows:

In writing about the scientific approach to the Study of Man, an anthropologist has a (…) duty to define in what relation to one another the various branches of anthropology really3 stand. He has to determine the place which anthropology ought to occupy in the wider fraternity of humanistic studies. He has also to reopen the old question, in what sense humanism can be scientific. (4)4

The real meeting ground of all branches of anthropology is the scientific study of culture. (4)

The ethnologist (,,,) can base his arguments on sound scientific data only if he understands what culture really is. Finally, the ethnographic field-worker cannot observe unless he knows what is relevant and essential, and is thus able to discard adventitious and fortuitous happenings. Thus, the scientific quota in all anthropological work consists in the theory of culture, with reference to the method of observation in the field and to the [theoretical] meaning of culture as [both] process and product.5 (5)

If anthropology can contribute towards a more scientific outlook on its legitimate subject matter, that is, culture, it will (…) base its principles and arguments on the study of man as he really is, moving in the complex, many-dimensional medium of cultural interests. (5)

Scientific method has been inherent in all historic work, in all chronicling, in every argument used in jurisprudence, economics, and linguistics. There is no such thing as description completely devoid of theory. Whether you reconstruct historic scenes, carry out a field investigation in a savage tribe or a civilized community, analyze statistics, or make inferences from an archaeological monument or a prehistoric find — every statement and every argument has to be made in words, that is, in concepts. Each concept, in turn, is the result of a [usually implicit] theory which declares that some facts are relevant and others adventitious, that some factors determine the course of events and others are merely accidental byplay.6 (7)

consideration of what it means to observe, to reconstruct or to state an historic fact (…) consists in (…) a methodical system of conscientious work.7 (8)

However we may define the word science in some philosophical or epistemological system, it is clear that it begins with the use of previous observation for the prediction of the future. In this sense the spirit as well as the performance of science must have [always] existed in the reasonable behavior of man… (8)

The scientific attitude, embodied in all primitive technology and also in the organization of primitive economic enterprises and social organization, that reliance on past experience with the view to future performance, is an integral factor which must be assumed as having been at work from the very beginning of mankind, ever since the species started on its career as homo faber, as homo sapiens, and as homo politicus. (10)

Out of an inchoate body of environmental factors, random adaptations, and experiences, primitive man in his scientific approach had to isolate the relevant factors and to embody them into systems of relations and determining factors. (…) All such productive technological activities were based on [implicit] theory in which relevant factors were isolated, in which the value of theoretical accuracy was appreciated, in which forethought in achievement was based on carefully formulated experiences from the past.  (10)

The main point I am attempting to make here is not so much that primitive man has his science, but first, rather, that the scientific attitude is as old as culture, and second, that the minimum definition of science is derived from any pragmatic performance. (10)

Were we to check these conclusions as to the nature of science, drawn from our analysis of the discoveries, inventions, and theories of primitive man, by the advance of modern physics since Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, or Faraday, we would find the same differential factors which distinguish the scientific from other modes of human thought and behavior. Everywhere we find, first and foremost, the isolation of the real and relevant factors in a given process. (10-11)

Science really begins when general principles have to be put to the test of fact, and when practical problems and theoretical relations of relevant factors are used to manipulate reality in human action. (11)

To observe means to select, to classify, to isolate on the basis of  theory.8 (12)

In the present crisis of our civilization we have risen to vertiginous heights in the mechanical and chemical sciences, pure and applied (…) But we have neither faith in, nor respect for, the conclusions of humanistic arguments, nor yet in the validity of social theories. Today we very much need to establish the balance between the hypertrophied influence of natural science and its applications on the one hand, and the backwardness of social science, with the constant impotence of social engineering, on the other. (13)

The first task of each science is to recognize its legitimate subject matter. It has to proceed to methods of true identification, or isolation of the relevant factors of its process. This is nothing else than the establishment of general laws, and of concepts which embody such laws. This, of course, implies that every theoretical principle must always be translatable into a method of observation, and again, that in observation we follow carefully the lines of our conceptual analysis. (14)

In reality (…) we could find (…) much (…) diversity of (…) theories and methods [in Anthropology,] each characterized by some ultimate conception as to what is the real principle of interpretation; each having some specific approach through which it hopes to reach the comprehension of a cultural process or product; each going into the field with a somewhat differential set of intellectual pigeonholes into which to gather and distribute evidence.9 Thus there is the [implied] comparative method (…) which (…) must remain the basis of any generalization, any theoretical principle, or any universal law applicable to our subject matter.10 (18) 

A great Scottish scholar, W. Robertson Smith, was perhaps the first clearly to insist on the sociological context in all discussions which refer not merely to organization of groups but also to belief, to ritual, and to myth.11 (19)

The whole method of drawing parallels between ethnographic objects and prehistoric findings [of the the archaeologist] was inspiring and fruitful, especially in the measure to which the archaeologist and the ethnographer were both interested in those laws of cultural process and product which allow us to relate an artifact to a technique, a technique to an economic pursuit, and an economic pursuit to some vital need of man or of a human group. (21)

The fundamental principle of the field-worker (…) is that ideas, emotions and conations never (…) lead a cryptic, hidden existence within the unexplorable depths of the mind, conscious or unconscious. All sound (…) experimental psychology can deal only with observations of overt behavior… (23)

We are mostly interested in the foundations of the  [anthropological] edifice, that is, in the really scientific quota contained in these various works. And here we would probably have to carry out a piece of work partly inspired by the profession of house-wreckers; certainly one in which a great many fundamental points would have to be questioned and (…) persistent errors of method indicated. (25)

Where do we find the main shortcomings of the various classical schools of anthropology? In my opinion, they always center round the question whether (…) the scholar has devoted sufficient attention to the full and clear analysis of the cultural reality with which he deals. Here it would be possible to show that throughout the scores or hundreds of books and articles devoted to primitive marriage, clanship, and kinship (…) there can hardly be found a single clear analysis of what is meant by a domestic institution or kinship.12 (26)

In real science the fact consists in the relatedness, provided that this is really determined, universal, and scientifically definable. (27)

To dissociate the studies of mind, of society and of culture, is to foredoom the results.13 (31)

Trait analysis and the characterization of culture by traits or trait complexes depends on the question whether they can be isolated as realities, and thus made comparable in observation and theory. (33)

There is a fundamental misunderstanding in any attempt at isolation of separate traits. The positive contribution of this essay will [be to] show how far and under what conditions we can isolate relevant realities.14 (34)

The only point which matters is whether we are able to isolate a related set of phenomena on the basis of a really scientific analysis, or [do so] on [the basis of] a mere arbitrary assumption. And again, the real point is whether (…) we attach the maximum value to characteristics of [an arbitrary] trait (…) or whether, on the contrary, we look only for relations and for forms which are determined by the cultural forces really at work. The [latter] is the only scientific way to our understanding of what culture really is. (…) On this point there can be no compromise, and there is no middle way.15 (34-35) 

  1. Malinowski a quarter century before Lévi-Strauss’ Parenté: “The credit of having laid the foundations of an anthropological study of religion belongs to Edward B. Tylor”, ‘Magic, Science and Religion‘ (in Science, Religion and Reality, ed Joseph Needham, 1925). ↩
  2. “The new science was born under the star of enthusiastic evolutionism, of anthropometric methods, and of revelatory discoveries in prehistory.” (4) ↩
  3. As emphasized in the passages given here from A Scientific Theory of Culture, it is remarkable how often Malinowski appeals to the complex of real-reality-realities-really. In Magic, Science and Religion , similarly, these appear over 150 times or once in every two pages. ↩
  4. All otherwise unidentified page numbers in this post refer to Bronislaw Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, 1944. All bolding has been added. The first word of cited passages has been capitalized in cases where it is not capitalized in Malinowski’s text. ↩
  5. What Malinowski calls ‘product’, McLuhan calls ‘effect’. Malinowski’s constant reference to meticulous observation and theory construction together is an example of what McLuhan calls ‘inclusivity’. Malinowski: “every theoretical principle must always be translatable into a method of observation” and at the same time all observation “must always be translatable” into “conceptual analysis” (14). ↩
  6. Comparably, the essential distinction in chemistry is between elements (and their compounds) and properties. The former explain, the latter are explained. Malinowski: “It is always necessary in the integral definition (…) to determine (…) essential nature and relate to it the other subsidiary functions” (114). ↩
  7. To “conscientious work” Malinowski contrasts mere intuition: “most principles, generalizations, and theories were implicit in the historian’s reconstruction, and were intuitive rather than systematic in nature.” (8) ↩
  8. The ‘theory’ from which observation arises as ‘product’ or ‘effect’ is, of course, nearly always implicit. ↩
  9. The anthropologist is therefore in the same position as the people and cultures being studied. What has to be accomplished is a kind of squaring (or taking to a higher power) of the inherent scientific approach of all human being. J.G. Frazer: “science is nothing but knowledge raised to the highest power” (‘Preface’ to Malinowski’s Argonauts of the western Pacific, an account of native enterprise and adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, 1922). ↩
  10. McLuhan’s mentor at the University of Manitoba, Rupert Lodge, espoused such a ‘comparative method’ — see The Comparative Method of Rupert Lodge. Malinowski cautions: “Obviously, this whole approach presupposes a really scientific definition of the realities compared. Unless we list, in our exhaustive inventories, really comparable phenomena, and are never duped by surface similarities or fictitious analogies, a great deal of labor may lead to incorrect conclusions” (18). Again: “In order, however, to make an historical process really significant in terms of explanation or analysis, it is above all necessary to prove that we are, along the time coordinate, linking up phenomena that are strictly comparable” (20). Still lateri: “in any (…) comparative research, the problem of identity first has to be faced and solved” (31): the common identity, that is, of the things to be compared. ↩
  11. What Malinowski calls ‘the sociological context’ here is what McLuhan calls the domain of the ‘artifact’. The essential factor for both is human ‘making’. Hence Malinowski’s interest in “those laws of cultural process and product which allow us to relate an artifact to a technique, a technique to an economic pursuit, and an economic pursuit to some vital need of man or of a human group” (21). ↩
  12. Regarding “there can hardly be found a single clear analysis of what is meant by a domestic institution or kinship”, Lévi-Strauss’ first major work, Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté, was published, perhaps not fortuitously, five years after Malinowski’s 1944 book in 1949. It is an exhaustive attempt to define kinship rigorously. On the next page after this passage Malinowski continues: “In all this we can see that not sufficient attention has been given so far to that scientific activity which (…) consists in clearly defining and relating the relevant factors which operate in such cultural facts as magic, totemism, the clan system, and the domestic institution” (27). Lévi-Strauss’ Le totémisme aujourd’hui was published in 1962. (Although Lévi-Strauss refers to Malinowski over and over again in his work, including to very obscure titles, A Scientific Theory of Culture does not seem to appear there at all — although he did know the later Magic, Science and Religion from 1948. Did he not know the 1944 book? Doubtful! Perhaps Lévi-Strauss had to ignore this great text in taking his different route to anthropological science? In any case, the description of Malinowski’s functionalism given by Lévi-Strauss in, say, Myth and Meaning is surprisingly simplistic and misleading. ↩
  13. A citation by Malinowski of himself from his article “Anthropology” in the thirteenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1926). ↩
  14. Malinowski’s point here reiterates the central lesson of the ‘new criticism’ with which he had been associated since the appearance of his essay, ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’ in 1923 as a ‘supplement’ to The Meaning of Meaning by C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards. That point might be formulated as the insistence on the inherent plurality to the meaning of words and the resulting need for great care in their use, especially in poetry and its criticism. ↩
  15. Malinowski’s thrust here is comparable to Lavoisier’s in the 1780s where the need was to consolidate and systematize existing findings in (what was to become) chemistry. The result in both cases is the identification of a new domain whose investigation would change the entire world in Lavoisier’s case or could and should change the entire world in Malinowski’s. As regards “no middle way”, compare McLuhan citing Aquinas citing Aristotle: “the basis of all paradox, Christian and secular, is to be found in the sixth book of the Physics of Aristotle, to which Aquinas refers in his Summa Theologica (…) The question for Aquinas is whether justification by faith occurs instantly or gradually. Aquinas says it occurs instantly because — ­here he appeals to Aristotle’s Physics  — “the whole preceding time during which anything moves towards its form, it is under the opposite form” (From Cliché to Archetype, 160). There can be “no middle way” in such cases because there can be no ground between grounds, no fundament between fundaments, no time between times. The history of the last 2500 years might be characterized as the consequences of the ever-repeated failure to understand this point. ↩

On the imbalance between physical and social science

Malinowski, A Scientific Theory of Culture, 1944

In the present crisis of our civilization we have risen to vertiginous heights in the mechanical and chemical sciences, pure and applied (…) But we have neither faith in, nor respect for, the conclusions of humanistic arguments, nor yet in the validity of social theories. Today we very much need to establish the balance between the hypertrophied influence of natural science and its applications on the one hand, and the backwardness of social science, with the constant impotence of social engineering, on the other. (13)

Havelock, The Crucifixion of Intellectual Man, 1950

As the west faces its recent dilemma of the abdication of practical foresight in face of crucial perils, while at the same time science becomes able to exercise its own forms of prediction with ever-increasing power and dangerous effect, it is profitable to recapture the original Greek view which unified the theoretical and the practical intelligence. It is premature to tax Greek thinkers with naiveté because they assumed that there are skills available to man to control and improve and civilize his life and action, and that these have to be trained and cultivated by the same logic that governs the physical sciences. The Greeks in fact invented political and social science and when they said “science”, they meant it. It was the techne, that procedure for which Plato sought an “epistemology” (episteme). Though his philosophy always concentrated on the abstract levels of the intellect, he never forgot the technical procedures which had given it birth. The moral effect of this unification was striking. (84)

McLuhan, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, 1954

Today with the revelation of the poetic process which is involved in ordinary cognition we stand on a very different threshold from that wherein Machiavelli stood. His was a door into negation and human weakness. Ours is the door to the positive powers of the human spirit in its natural creativity. This [2-fold] door opens on to psychic powers comparable to the physical powers made available via nuclear fission and fusion. Through this door men have seen a possible path to the totalitarian remaking of human nature. Machiavelli showed us the way to a new circle of the Inferno. Knowledge of the creative process in art, science, and cognition shows us the way either to the earthly paradise or to complete madness. It is to be either the top of Mount Purgatory or the abyss.