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. ↩