ABSTRACT: This essay seeks to read Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term in literary-critical terms, broadly under- stood. As such, it supplements the psychological, epistemological, and cultural readings already available from historians and theorists like George W. Stocking, Clifford Geertz, James Clifford, and Chris- tina Thompson. The essay considers the diary as a genre, but also as a variety of moral imposition that extracts patterns from experience by virtue of its unique form. As examples, it considers the patterns in Malinowski’s response to landscape and to the literature he read dur- ing the Diary’s composition, and how these underpinned his episte- mological, ethnographic thinking during the period. “Man has the choice of stooping in science beneath himself, and striving in science beyond himself; and the ‘Know Thyself’ is, for him, not a law to which he must in peace submit; but a precept which of all others is the most painful to understand, and the most difficult to fulfil.” —John Ruskin, The Eagle’s Nest 1 The restraints we place on imaginative writers—as opposed to dis- cursive ones, in the professions—are essentially few, since freedom of expression is in the nature of their pursuit and of their value to society. Tolstoy, for example, argued only that authors should 1. John Ruskin, The Eagle’s Nest: Ten Lectures on the Relation of Natural Science to Art, Given before the University of Oxford, in Lent Term, 1872 (London: George Allen, 1900). 29 Crucible or Centrifuge? Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term Richard Lansdown James Cook University Configurations, 2014, 22:29–55 © 2014 by Johns Hopkins University Press and the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. 02_22.1_lansdowne_029-055.indd 29 4/30/14 2:21 PM