Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski conducted extended fieldwork among the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia between 1915 and 1918, living in a tent among the community rather than observing from a colonial verandah. Argonauts of the Western Pacific, his 1922 account of the Trobriand kula ring of ceremonial exchange, set out participant observation as a systematic method and argued that a society's institutions have to be understood by the function they serve for the people living inside them, a position that became known as functionalism. He taught anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1927, where his seminar trained a generation of British social anthropologists.