Bronislaw Malinowski and Linguistic Pragmatics In 1923 Bronislaw Malinowski repeated his claim for an "Ethnolinguistic theory" which he enforced 1920 in his first linguistic paper and which became the guideline for his "ethnographic theory of language." In 1997 the linguist William Foley published his monograph "Anthropological Linguistics—An Introduction"; and in the same year the anthropologist Alessandro Duranti published his monograph "Linguistic Anthropology." It seems that with the publication of these two standard textbooks the interdisciplinary field of "ethnolinguistics" has (...) finally gained its due importance within the disciplines of anthropology and linguistics. Bill Foley states in his textbook that "the boundary between pragmatics and anthropological linguistics or sociolinguistics is impossible to draw at present." So if we recognize Bronislaw Malinowski not only as one of the founders of modern social anthropology but also as one of the founding fathers of anthropological linguistics, we should have a closer look at Malinowski's importance for pragmatics in general. This paper presents Malinowski's contributions to the ethnographic theory of language, assesses his role as an apologist of anthropological linguistics, and discusses his influence on developments in linguistic pragmatics. (shrink)

Bronisław Kasper Malinowski was a Polish anthropologist, ethnographer, and sociologist. Malinowski is often considered as a pioneer in the ethnographic field research methods, such as participant observation, interviews, and statistics. His studies focused on beliefs and forms of social organization. Malinowski is often recognized as one of the founders of modern social anthropology and functionalism.

This book discusses the legal thought of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), undoubtedly one of the titans of social sciences who greatly influenced not only the shape of modern cultural anthropology but also the social sciences as a whole. This is the first comprehensive work to focus on his legal conceptions: while much has been written about his views on language, magic, religion, and culture, his views on law have not been fairly reconstructed or recapitulated. A glance at the existing literature (...) illustrates how little has been written about Malinowski's understanding of law, especially in the legal sciences. This becomes even more evident given the fact that Malinowski devoted much of his scholarly work to studying law, especially in the last period of his life, during which he conducted broad research on law and "primitive jurisprudence". The main aim of this book is to address this gap and to present in detail Malinowski's thoughts on law. This book is divided into two parts. Part I focuses largely on the impact that works of two distinguished professors from his alma mater (L. Dargun and S. Estreicher) had on Malinowski's legal thoughts, while Part II reconstructs Malinowski's inclusive, broad and multidimensional understanding of law and provides new readings of his legal conceptions mainly from the perspective of reciprocity. The book offers a fresh look at his views on law, paving the way for further studies on legal issues inspired by his methodological and theoretical achievements. Malinowski's understanding of law provides a wealth of fodder from which to formulate interesting research questions and a solid foundation for developing theories that more accurately describe and explain how law functions, based on new findings in the social and natural sciences. (shrink)

Recent research into the life and work of Bronislaw Malinowski, one of the most important figures in British social anthropology in the 20th century, has concentrated upon his early life up to and including the years he spent in the Trobriand Islands undertaking his epoch-making fieldwork. However, very little of this research has been into the last decade of his life, especially his work on the impact of imperialism upon Africa’s colonized peoples. The purpose of this article is to (...) extend this interest to his later research by contextualizing, describing and analysing Malinowski’s relationship with King Sobhuza II of Swaziland to whom he was introduced in 1934. I demonstrate that over the following four years, Malinowski sought to assist Sobhuza in regard to a number of matters, most notably his efforts to establish a national school linked to the Swazi age-grade system and his negotiations over the proposed transfer of Swaziland to the Union of South Africa. I argue that Malinowski gave this assistance because Sobhuza personified for him his vision of colonial and even postcolonial Africa which is contained in the largely ignored works of Freedom and Civilization and The Dynamics of Culture Change. Thus, these works reflect not only his background as a Pole in the Hapsburg empire, but also his contemporary experiences of colonial Africa. (shrink)

Ernest Gellner's final book, first published in 1998, is a synoptic interpretation of the thought of Wittgenstein and Malinowski.

In this article Bronislaw Malinowski’s ideas on humanism are analysed with reference to unpublished texts and drafts, published texts such as A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, his personal letters to his wife Elsie Masson and articles in which his ideals were reflected. An attempt will also be made to set Malinowski’s proposal for the New Humanism in its scientific and cultural context along with the work of other great thinkers and humanists of his day. Finally, (...) it is suggested that Malinowski’s ideas in this field, despite the passage of time, are still relevant to social anthropology and, at the very least, still inspire new thoughts. (shrink)

This article situates the collecting practices of museums of natural history in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in dialogue with similar practices amongst societies in the Pacific by focusing on how European curators, dealers in natural history and Pacific Islanders shared a common fascination withSpondylusshells. In particular, this article examines the processes for turningSpondylusshells into unique or duplicate specimens.Spondylusshells were crucial for regulating gift and commercial exchanges in the societies of both regions. Famously, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski claimed that (...) these shells were an essential element of the gift-basedkulaexchange, which helped him distinguish Western capitalist society from less developed societies without commercial trade. YetSpondylusshells were also collected and exchanged as gifts amongst British and European naturalists in this period, performing the same roles as in Melanesia. In addition, such gift exchanges could only come into being thanks to the actions of commercially motivated dealers, located both in the Pacific and in Europe, who were the suppliers of these shells both to Melanesian participants in thekulaand to Western natural historians and collectors. These observations call into question earlier arguments that equate modernity with the rise of commercial capitalism. It is instead claimed that commercial and gift exchanges were intricately connected and reliant on each other throughout the period, whether in the worlds of Western museums or in Pacific archipelagos. The act of turningSpondylusshells into unique or duplicate specimens was the key tool for regulating these exchanges. (shrink)

The present article develops a new approach to intellectual history and sociology of knowledge. Its point of departure is to investigate the conditions under which social thinkers assume the iconic reputation. What does it take to become ‘a founding father’ of a humanistic discipline? How do social thinkers achieve the status of a trans-disciplinary star? Why some intellectuals attract tremendous attention and ‘go down in history’ despite personal and professional failures, while others enjoy only limited recognition or simply sink into (...) oblivion, even if they have met all the standards of their day? Quite a few sociologists have tackled this elusive issue. Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Lamont and Randall Collins are among those who fleshed out strong explanatory frameworks. This project adds to this body of knowledge by emphasizing cultural factors that these authors downplayed in their seminal accounts, despite being aware of their significance. By showing why these underdeveloped aspects of their works need to be incorporated into the debate and how this can be achieved, this article introduces a new theorization of the iconic, lasting intellectual reputation substantiated by evidence from the lifeworks of Bronisław Malinowski and Michel Foucault. As such, it aims, minimally, to make sociology of knowledge decisively ‘cultural’. Maximally, it seeks to demonstrate that the iconic success of intellectual intervention in social theory depends on carefully performed and contingently mediated engagement with the binary systems of symbolic classification. (shrink)

This paper quotes a story about Bronislaw Malinowski trying to find out a myth and extracts a dilemma from it. The story content seems related to self-referential puzzles.

The paper is concerned with the problem of characterization of strengthenings of the so-called Łukasiewicz-like sentential calculi. The calculi under consideration are determined by n-valued Łukasiewicz matrices with superdesignated logical values. In general, Łukasiewicz-like sentential calculi are not implicative in the sense of [7]. Despite of this fact, in our considerations we use matrices analogous to S-algebras of Rasiowa. The main result of the paper says that the degree of maximality of any n-valued Łukasiewicz-like sentential calculus is finite and equal (...) to the degree of maximality of the corresponding n-valued Łukasiewicz calculus. (shrink)

This study investigated the link between meditation, self-reported mindfulness and cognitive flexibility as well as other attentional functions. It compared a group of meditators experienced in mindfulness meditation with a meditation-naïve control group on measures of Stroop interference and the “d2-concentration and endurance test”. Overall the results suggest that attentional performance and cognitive flexibility are positively related to meditation practice and levels of mindfulness. Meditators performed significantly better than non-meditators on all measures of attention. Furthermore, self-reported mindfulness was higher in (...) meditators than non-meditators and correlations with all attention measures were of moderate to high strength. This pattern of results suggests that mindfulness is intimately linked to improvements of attentional functions and cognitive flexibility. The relevance of these findings for mental balance and well-being are discussed. (shrink)

This running account of the fighting shows the complex circumstances that surrounded the Warsaw Uprising and its tragic finale. The author recounts the frontline atmosphere, the fighting frequently taking place between two floors—even two rooms—of one house, the scant living space and the terrible air-raids on hospitals and clinics. A look back at sixty-three days in which superhuman courage and sacrifice walked hand in hand with fear and dejection.

In this article I argue that an adequate response to climate change requires an overcoming of the metaphysics of presence that is structuring our relationship with the weather. I trace the links between this metaphysics and the dominant way that the topic of climate change is being narrated, which is structured around the transition from diagnosis to cure, from the scientific reading to the technological writing of the weather. Against this narrative I develop a rather different account of the current (...) ecopolitical moment. I first argue that an understanding of anthropogenic climate change must be grounded in a biosemiotic analysis of the evolving metabolism between society and nature, one that is alert to the way that metabolism involves a folded relation between inside and outside, and that recognizes the constant deferral of biosemiotic meaning in ecological systems. I then use a deconstructive reading of climate technics to problematize the distinction between the diagnosis and solution of climate change, and expose modern scientific practices of reading the climate as already containing within themselves a notion of weather’s technological writability. Exploring the notion that previous transformations of the metabolic regime of society have always involved transformations of notions of the human, I conclude by sketching out a different way of reading and writing the weather, one that takes place in the ‘opening’ of climate change, that problematizes the idea of the human as the end of nature, and that thereby implies a more radical version of climate responsibility. (shrink)

In this article the author argues that we need not just to ‘decolonize’ the Anthropocene but also to ‘desecularize’ it – to be aware that in the new age of the Earth we may be coeval with gods and spirits. Drawing particularly on the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Georges Bataille, and using concepts from both thermodynamics and fluid dynamics, the author starts to develop an interdisciplinary theory of planetary spirit and use this to speak of both the (...) ‘laminar’ high gods of time that are being invoked to summon the story of Earth’s ongoing transformation into a canonical mythos, and the turbulent lower spirits of place which manifest particular, situated dynamics on an Earth crossed by interlocking gradients and flows of energy, value, power and entropy. He suggests that what might once have been distinct territorialized ‘cultures’ or ‘natures’ in which humans engaged in particular situated patterns of interaction with animals, spirits and other beings are increasingly being convened into a global multinatural system. (shrink)

In this paper we investigate Boolean connexive logics in a language with modal operators: □, ◊. In such logics, negation, conjunction, and disjunction behave in a classical, Boolean way. Only implication is non-classical. We construct these logics by mixing relating semantics with possible worlds. This way, we obtain connexive counterparts of basic normal modal logics. However, most of their traditional axioms formulated in terms of modalities and implication do not hold anymore without additional constraints, since our implication is weaker than (...) the material one. In the final section, we present a tableau approach to the discussed modal logics. (shrink)