BiblioVault - Books about Trobriand Islands

Culture and Inference

A Trobriand Case Study

Edwin Hutchins

Harvard University Press, 1980

This book takes a major step in psychological anthropology by applying new analytic tools from cognitive science to one of the oldest and most vexing anthropological problems: the nature of "primitive" thought.

For a decade or more there has been broad agreement within anthropology that culture might be usefully viewed as a system of tacit rules that constrain the meaningful interpretation of events and serve as a guide to action. However, no one has made a serious attempt to write a cultural grammar that would make such rules explicit. In Culture and Inference Edwin Hutchins makes just such an attempt for one enormously instructive case, the Trobriand Islanders' system of land tenure.

Using the propositional network notation developed by Rumeihart and Norman, Hutchins describes native knowledge about land tenure as a set of twelve propositions. Inferences are derived from these propositions by a set of transfer formulas that govern the way in which static knowledge about land tenure can be applied to new disputes. After deriving this descriptive system by extensive observation of the Trobrianders' land courts and by interrogation of litigants, Hutchins provides a test of his grammar by showing how it can be used to simulate decisions in new cases.

What is most interesting about these simulations, generally, is that theyrequire all the same logical operations that arise from a careful analysis of Western thought. Looking closely at "primitive" inference in a natural situation, Hutchins finds that Trobriand reasoning is no more primitive than our own.

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Malinowski's Kiriwina

Fieldwork Photography 1915-1918

Michael W. Young

University of Chicago Press, 1998

Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands in eastern Papua New Guinea, is anthropology's "sacred place." It was here that Bronislaw Malinowski conducted the path-breaking fieldwork that enabled him to revolutionize British social anthropology. And it was here that he developed one of anthropology's most important tools: photography.

Malinowski's Kiriwina presents nearly two hundred of Malinowski's previously unpublished photographs, taken between 1915 and 1918, of the Trobriand Islanders. The images are more than embellishments of his ethnography; they are a recreation in striking detail of a distant world. Michael Young, an anthropologist and Malinowski's authorized biographer, has selected the photographs based on one of Malinowski's unpublished studies of the region, and the plan of that abandoned project has helped structure this book.

Divided into fourteen sections, Malinowski's Kiriwina is a series of linked photo-essays based on Trobriand institutions and cultural themes as described by Malinowski. The introductory essay by Young appraises the founding anthropologist's photographic oeuvre, explains the historical circumstances and technical aspects of the images, and puts them in their colonial context. Young illuminates the photographs with quotations from Malinowski's diaries, letters, and field notes, thereby giving a biographical dimension to the collection. Commentaries on the images by contemporary Trobrianders add a further layer of interpretation. The result is a stunning record not only of a fascinating place, but of the mutual relationship between ethnography and the visual.

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Ways of Baloma

Rethinking Magic and Kinship From the Trobriands

Mark S. Mosko

HAU, 2017

Bronislaw Malinowski’s path-breaking research in the Trobriand Islands shaped much of modern anthropology’s disciplinary paradigm. Yet many conundrums remain. For example, Malinowski asserted that baloma spirits of the dead were responsible for procreation but had limited influence on their living descendants in magic and other matters, claims largely unchallenged by subsequent field investigators, until now. Based on extended fieldwork at Omarakana village—home of the Tabalu “Paramount Chief”—Mark S. Mosko argues instead that these and virtually all contexts of indigenous sociality are conceived as sacrificial reciprocities between the mirror worlds that baloma and humans inhabit.

Informed by a synthesis of Strathern’s model of “dividual personhood” and Lévy-Bruhl’s theory of “participation,” Mosko upends a century of discussion and debate extending from Malinowski to anthropology’s other leading thinkers. His account of the intimate interdependencies of humans and spirits in the cosmic generation and coordination of “life” (momova) and “death” (kaliga) strikes at the nexus of anthropology’s received wisdom, and Ways of Baloma will inevitably lead practitioners and students to reflect anew on the discipline’s multifold theories of personhood, ritual agency, and sociality.

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