“Mixed identity of circumstances”: Bronisław Malinowski in Australia and Melanesia

Abstract

During his stay in Australia and Melanesia from 1914 to 1920, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski frequently experienced dichotomous and contradictory attitudes to people, places, and events: the contrast between the ‘civilized’ Australia and the ‘savage’ Melanesia; the background of the Austria-ruled Poland in which he grew up and the British-dominated Australia, Austria’s enemy in the First World War; the emotional tension of simultaneous attraction to two women – Nina Stirling of Adelaide and Elsie Rosaline Masson of Melbourne; the dilemma of the ‘heroic’ versus the ‘unheroic’ related to the war. Most of the dualities of Malinowski’s Australian-Melanesian experience, reflected in letters to his mother Józefa Malinowska, Elsie R. Masson, and in Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1989), were resolved at the end of the period, which became a turning point in his life.

Keywords

• australia
• bronisław malinowski
• civilization
• first world war
• german culture
• melanesia
• ‘savages’