“Magic, Science and Religion”

The scholarly education of Bronislaw Kaspar Malinowski (b. 1884; d. 1942) is characterized by both interdisciplinarity (he studied mathematics, physics, philosophy, psychology, economics and anthropology) and internationality (born in Krakow, Poland, he studied in Krakow, Leipzig and London). Malinowski spent most of his teaching career at the London School of Economics where he was professor of anthropology between 1922 and 1938.

Malinowski is most known for his fieldwork in Melanesia and his seminal contributions to the method of “participant observation” (some regard Malinowski as the inventor of this method). His works Argonauts of the Western Pacifics (1922) and Coral Gardens and Their Magic (1935), where he recollects and analyses his fieldwork experiences in the framework of his “functionalist” theory, exerted a major influence on the later debate on “magic”.

The excerpt is taken from his article “Magic, Science and Religion” that was posthumously published in 1948. In this text, Malinowski adopts and combines a variety of former approaches, while adding some new perspectives. By contrasting “magic” with “science”, Malinowski follows in the footsteps of Frazer (see Chapter 12): “magic” is a fraudulent “pseudo-science” and is characterized by a false “association of ideas”.