From ‘armchair’ to ‘open-air’ anthropology: Views of culture in James George Frazer and Bronisław Malinowski

In 1922 two works were published simultaneously marking a significant turning point in the emerging discipline devoted to the study of man and culture, Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Malinowski. By that time, Frazer had long been recognized as a leading figure in anthropology, and yet his reliance upon an evolutionary paradigm and his consequent choice of the comparative method were being called into question by new emerging paradygms by new generation of younger anthropologists who were narrating their own field experience with the natives, focusing on different kinds of questions concerning the life and culture of particular peoples, rather than simply collecting a reportoire of facts from second-hand accounts. Among them, Bronisław Malinowski, more than anyone else, has been credited with having sounded the death knell for Frazer’s removed ‘armchair’ approach to anthropology.