Strange mythologies: cultural and linguistic opacity in Argonauts of the Western Pacific

ABSTRACT

During the years he spent conducting fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, Bronislaw Malinowski became convinced that foreign cultures should be studied in their entirety, as fully integrated, “organic” structures. In what follows, I explore his attempt to achieve this objective, with regard to a specific cultural practice, in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). I begin by discussing his use of certain tropes, discursive techniques, and narratorial modes that are more often associated with the genres of travel writing and adventure fiction. I then address his conviction that even the most mundane features of social and cultural life carry ethnographic value, allowing the anthropologist to produce a comprehensive overview of any given culture. As I argue, however, this totalizing impulse is frustrated on more than one occasion in Argonauts, when Malinowski encounters various “opacities” that cannot be so easily assimilated into ethnographic discourse, thus revealing the limits of the very omniscience that he claims to be pursuing.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural difference
• anthropology
• functionalism
• magic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Malinowski, Argonauts, 83.

2. Malinowski, Argonauts, 83.

3. Malinowski, Argonauts, 510.

4. Malinowski, Argonauts, 4.

5. Young, Malinowski, 328.

6. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 78.

7. Pratt, “Fieldwork,” 31–3. For more on the discursive strategies by which ethnographic authority is established, see Clifford, “On Ethnographic Authority.”

8. Pratt, “Fieldwork,” 32.

9. Pratt, “Fieldwork,” 32.

10. Pratt, “Fieldwork,” 32.

11. Malinowski, Argonauts, 38–9.

12. Malinowski, Argonauts, 45–7.

13. Malinowski, Argonauts, 49–51. For a brief biographical account of this journey, which Malinowski undertook in November and December of 1917, see Young, Malinowski, 492–3.

14. When Malinowski’s own diary from the years 1914–15 and 1917–18 was published in 1967, its candid declarations of boredom (“This interview bored me and did not go well” [Diary, 151]), alienation (“I thought of civilization with a pang” [Diary, 151]), and misanthropy (“The [natives] were getting on my nerves, and I could not concentrate” [Diary, 284]) generated considerable controversy.

15. Clifford, “Introduction,” 5.

16. This is a particularly salient example of what Clifford Geertz refers to as “genre blurring” (Local Knowledge, 19)—a “state of affairs,” he argues, that has become “the natural condition of things and … is leading to significant realignments in scholarly affinities” (Local Knowledge, 8).

17. For more on Malinowski’s literary influences, see Thornton, “Imagine”; Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning”; and Thompson, “Anthropology’s Conrad.”

18. Genette, Narrative Discourse, 189.

19. Pratt, “Fieldwork,” 39.

20. Pratt, “Fieldwork,” 39.

21. Malinowski, Argonauts, 25.

22. Malinowski, Argonauts, 6.

23. Malinowski, Argonauts, 6.

24. Geertz, Works, 4–5. In a fascinating analysis of modern anthropology, Marilyn Strathern makes a similar observation. “Preparing an [ethnographic] description,” she argues, “requires specific literary strategies, the construction of a persuasive fiction: a monograph must be laid out in such a way that it can convey novel compositions of ideas. This becomes a question of its own internal composition, of the organization of analysis, the sequence in which the reader is introduced to concepts, the way categories are juxtaposed or dualisms reversed … So whether a writer chooses (say) a ‘scientific’ style or a ‘literary’ one signals the kind of fiction it is; there cannot be a choice to eschew fiction altogether” (“Out of Context,” 256–7 [my italics]).

25. Malinowski, Diary, 41, 160.

26. Firth, “Introduction,” 6. With this comparison, as George W. Stocking infers, Malinowski was most probably drawing a distinction between “the surveying of an ethnographic surface and the mining of its deeper psychological meaning” (“The Ethnographer’s Magic,” 51).

27. Malinowski, Diary, 69.

28. Malinowski, Diary, 50–1. This particular passage is one of several discussed by Christina A. Thompson in “Anthropology’s Conrad.”

29. In his essay “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning,” James Clifford describes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) as a “paradigm of ethnographic subjectivity,” and he explores the “specific echoes and analogies linking Conrad’s situation of cultural liminality in the Congo with Malinowski’s in the Trobriands” (“On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning,” 100). “Obviously,” Clifford notes, “these are different writing experiences: ethnographies are both like and unlike novels. But in an important general way the two experiences enact the process of fictional self-fashioning in relative systems of culture and language that I call ethnographic” (“On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning,” 110).

30. Malinowski, Diary, 137–8.

31. Malinowski, Diary, 140. The reader may like to compare these passages to the corresponding arrival scenes, taken from Argonauts, that are cited above.

32. It was Roland Barthes, of course, who first used the term “reality effect” to describe those “superfluous” details whose primary narratological purpose is to persuade us that what we are reading is real: “Flaubert’s barometer [in ‘Un Coeur Simple’], Michelet’s little door [in Histoire de France: La Révolution] finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of ‘the real’ (and not its contingent contents) which is then signified [and] the reality effect is produced” (“The Reality Effect,” 148). As we have seen, the fictional dimension of ethnographic discourse serves a similar authenticating function—allowing the anthropologist to establish his or her ethnographic authority (Pratt) and persuading the reader that the “miracle” of cultural communion has actually occurred (Geertz). In what follows, however, I shall be emphasizing the underlying ambiguity of such “fictional” strategies, arguing that they can also have an irrealizing or deauthenticating influence on the discourse.

33. Malinowski, Argonauts, 195.

34. Malinowski, Argonauts, 25.

35. Thornton, “Imagine,” 10.

36. Malinowski, Argonauts, 3–4.

37. In the field of narrative theory, “narrativity” is a term that is used to designate “the quality of being narrative, the set of properties characterizing narratives and distinguishing them from non-narratives.” It also refers to “the set of optional features that make narratives more prototypically narrative-like, more immediately identified, processed, and interpreted as narratives” (Prince, “Narrativity,” 387).

38. Malinowski, Argonauts, 13.

39. Malinowski, Argonauts, 376.

40. Apparently, To’uluwa, the chief of Omarakana, “got it into his head that [Malinowski] had brought him bad luck, and so when he planned his next trip, [the anthropologist] was not taken into his confidence or allowed to form one of the party” (Malinowski, Argonauts, 479).

41. Malinowski, Argonauts, 376 (my italics).

42. Malinowski, Argonauts, xvi.

43. Malinowski, Argonauts, 18–19.

44. Malinowski, Argonauts, 20.

45. Malinowski, Argonauts, 21.

46. Malinowski, Argonauts, 11.

47. Malinowski, Argonauts, 515; One could see this methodology as the ethnographic equivalent of Barthes’ insistence that every detail of a narrative, however minor, carries semiotic value. “[E]verything in [a narrative] signifies,” he argues. “Even were a detail to appear irretrievably insignificant, resistant to all functionality, it would nonetheless end up with precisely the meaning of absurdity or uselessness” (“Introduction,” 261). And this, in turn, may bring to mind Malinowski’s notion of phatic communion, as elucidated in his 1923 essay “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” Here, Malinowski proposes that “a mere phrase of politeness, in use as much among savage tribes as in a European drawing room, fulfills a function to which the meaning of its words is almost completely irrelevant” (“The Problem of Meaning,” 313). Such “meaningless” pleasantries, he says, are simply designed to create an “atmosphere of sociability” and to avoid the “strange and unpleasant tension” that people feel “when facing each other in silence” (“The Problem of Meaning,” 314–15).

48. Malinowski, “Ethnology,” 214. For the functionalist, Malinowski would explain in a posthumously published essay, culture is regarded as (1) “an instrumental apparatus by which man is put in a position the better to cope with the concrete specific problems that face him in his environment in the course of the satisfaction of his needs”; (2) “a system of objects, activities, and attitudes in which every part exists as a means to an end”; and (3) “an integral [organism] in which the various elements are interdependent” (A Scientific Theory, 150).

49. Malinowski, Argonauts, 115.

50. Malinowski, Argonauts, 115.

51. Malinowski, Argonauts, 115.

52. Malinowski, Argonauts, 116.

53. Malinowski, Argonauts, 127.

54. Malinowski, Argonauts, 392.

55. Malinowski, Argonauts, 392.

56. Malinowski, Argonauts, 393–5.

57. Malinowski, Argonauts, 397.

58. Malinowski, Argonauts, 6; These principles are famously enumerated in the introduction to Argonauts (see, in particular, 6–25).

59. Malinowski, Argonauts, 517.

60. In Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935), a two-volume study of Trobriand cultivation practices, Malinowski goes so far as to include a substantial appendix entitled “Confessions of Ignorance and Failure” (Coral Gardens, vol. 1, 452–82). “[I]t is the duty of the field-worker,” he argues, “to render a careful and sincere account of all his failures and inadequacies” (Coral Gardens, vol. 1, 452)—a duty that the author himself discharges in admirable detail over the following thirty pages.

61. Malinowski, Argonauts, 432.

62. Malinowski, Argonauts, 344.

63. Malinowski, Argonauts, 130 (my italics). This last passage indicates that the speaker’s companions will arrive at their destination in the evening, while he will arrive earlier in the day (with the “rising sun”).

64. Malinowski, Argonauts, 443.

65. Malinowski, Argonauts, 443.

66. Malinowski, Argonauts, 433.

67. Malinowski, Coral Gardens, vol. 2, 225.

68. Malinowski, Coral Gardens, vol. 2, 221–2.

69. Malinowski, Coral Gardens, vol. 2, 225.

70. Malinowski, Coral Gardens, vol. 2, 225.

71. Malinowski, Coral Gardens, vol. 2, 218. In an essay on the interpretation (and overinterpretation) of Balinese culture, Mark Hobart uses the term “hyporeality” to describe a “domain of underdetermined [cultural] facts” that are subject to continued ethnographic analysis—yet remain “delightfully intransigent to explanation” (“As They Like It,” 136).

72. Malinowski, Argonauts, 262.

73. Malinowski, Argonauts, 255.

74. Malinowski, Argonauts, 255.

75. Malinowski, Argonauts, 517; As James Clifford observes, “Cultural descriptions in Malinowski’s style of functionalism strove for a kind of unified personality, but a convincing totalization always escaped them. Malinowski never did pull together Trobriand culture; he produced no synthetic portrait, only densely contextualized monographs on important institutions. Moreover, his obsessive inclusion of data, ‘imponderabilia,’ and vernacular texts may be seen as a desire to unmake as well as to make whole; such additive, metonymic empiricism undermines the construction of functional synecdochic representations” (“On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning,” 104). For more on the contradictory nature of Malinowski’s functionalism, see Gellner, Language, 134.

76. Of course, Malinowski’s methodological candor doesn’t entirely resolve the tension between his desire for ethnographic omniscience and the various opacities he encounters (and acknowledges) while in the field. On the contrary, it is during such encounters, as he struggles to understand a magical spell or mythological narrative, that the disparity between omniscience and ignorance becomes most acute.

77. Clifford, “On Ethnographic Surrealism,” 145.

78. Greenblatt, Will, 323–4. Incidentally, in his preface to Argonauts, James Frazer praises Malinowski for acknowledging the “complexity of human nature”—and compares him, in this regard, to Shakespeare, whose characters are also “solid” and three-dimensional, “being drawn not from one side only but from many” (“Preface,” ix).

79. Melville, Typee, 177; Leavis, The Great Tradition, 177.

80. Malinowski, Argonauts, 6.

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Bede Scott

Bede Scott is an associate professor of world literature in the School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is the author of On Lightness in World Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and Affective Disorders: Emotion in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Liverpool University Press, 2019). His most recent articles have appeared in Modern Fiction Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, and English Studies.