Adam Kuper, whose most recent book is The Reinvention of Primitive Society, is a professor of anthropology at Brunel University.
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Vol. 26 No. 19 · 7 October 2004
pages 29-30 | 3095 words
Off the Verandah
Adam Kuper
- Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist 1884-1920 by Michael Young
Yale, 690 pp, £25.00, May 2004, ISBN 0 300 10294 1
Michael Young’s biography takes Bronislaw Malinowski to the age of 36, when the brilliant Polish anthropologist completed his field study of the Trobriand Islands, married, and prepared to make his career back in Europe. Young is a Melanesian ethnographer himself, and the book comes into its own when Malinowski arrives in Australia, on the eve of the Great War, and begins the expeditions to Papua that effectively marked the beginning of modern anthropology.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 22 · 18 November 2004
From Halina Filipowicz
Adam Kuper's piece on Malinowski may have left some readers with a misapprehension as to the identity of Malinowski's closest friend (LRB, 7 October). He was not, as Kuper has it, 'the painter and writer Stanislaw Witkiewicz', but Witkiewicz's son, the painter and writer Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, also known as Witkacy. Witkacy committed suicide not in 1919, as Kuper has it, but on 18 September 1939, on hearing the news that Poland, which had been attacked on 1 September by Germany, had been invaded on 17 September by the Soviet Union.
Halina Filipowicz
University of Wisconsin-Madison
