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London Review of Books

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Adam Kuper

  • Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist 1884-1920 by Michael Young  Buy this book

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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Adam Kuper, whose most recent book is The Reinvention of Primitive Society, is a professor of anthropology at Brunel University.