Should Have Known

Abstract

First paragraph: When the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski arrived in the Trobriand Islands in 1915, he was an Austro-Hungarian subject in a British territory at risk of internment. Stranded there, he stayed put and turned this long-term presence into the instrument that defines social anthropology even today. But World War I was not the only war that shaped his work in a profound manner: from archaeological work coming out recently we know that the kula, the intricate ceremonial exchange system he described as proof of the universality of rational human thought, was in fact a colonial phenomenon, the result of a decades-long pacification process.