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Before and After Malinowski: Alternative
Views on the History of Anthropology
[A Virtual Round Table at the Royal
Anthropological Institute, London, 7 July 2022]
Han F. Vermeulen
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle (Saale)
Frederico Delgado Rosa
CRIA / NOVA FCSH
2022
FULL REFERENCE
Vermeulen, Han F. & Frederico Delgado Rosa (dir.). 2022. “Before and After Malinowski: Alternative Views
on the History of Anthropology [A Virtual Round Table at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London,
7 July 2022]” (avec la participation de Sophie Chevalier, Barbara Chambers Dawson, Thomas Hylland
Eriksen, Michael Kraus, Adam Kuper, Herbert S. Lewis, Andrew Lyons, David Mills, David Shankland, James
Urry, et Rosemary Lévy Zumwalt), Bérose - Encyclopédie internationale des histoires de l’anthropologie , Paris.
BEROSE Publisher: ISSN 2648-2770
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Visited on 17 March 2023 at 22:55
The present article is a special issue including fourteen short essays originally delivered at a
virtual round table held on July 7, 2022, at the Royal Anthropological Institute ( RAI) [ 1],
London, to celebrate the centennial of Bronisław Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific
(1922–2022) and the appearance of the edited volume Ethnographers Before Malinowski:
Pioneers of Anthropological Fieldwork 1870-1922 (Rosa and Vermeulen, Berghahn Books, EASA
Series, 2022). [ 2] Chaired by David Shankland and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, with Andrew
Lyons as discussant, this two-part event highlighted the history of ethnography before
Malinowski’s Argonauts, the genesis of British social anthropology in 1922, and its aftermath
in Britain and beyond.
The resulting papers discuss the three theses that opened the round table: (1) In the fifty years
before the publication of Argonauts of the Western Pacific, a growing number of ethnographers
produced hundreds of ethnographic monographs worldwide, but much of their work was
sidetracked or neglected by Malinowski and his followers; (2) Malinowski is still celebrated as
the inventor of intensive fieldwork in a single society, despite the fact that he had many
predecessors in other societies and continents pursuing the same goal; and (3) the success of