Books like Magic, science, and religion, and other essays by Bronisław Malinowski

**The Book** Malinowski's research has had a profound impact on the study of magical and religious practice in both the modern and ancient worlds, along with the works of Mauss. Three famous Malinowski essays. Malinowski, one of the all-time great anthropologists, had a talent for bringing together in single comprehension the warm reality of human living with the cool abstractions of science. His pages have become an almost indispensable link between the knowing of exotic and remote people with theoretical knowledge about humankind. An important collection of three of his most famous essays, *Magic, Science and Religion* offers readers a set of concepts about religion, magic, science, rite and myth in the course of forming vivid impressions and understandings of the Trobrianders of New Guinea. **About the Author** Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), Anglo-Polish anthropologist, was born in what was then Austrian Poland of a long line of Polish nobility and landed gentry. He was educated at the Polish University of Cracow, from which he received his doctorate in 1908 with the highest honors of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He also studied at the University of Leipzig and later went on to London, where from 1910 he was associated with the London School of Economics. From 1914 to 1918 Dr. Malinowski was a member of the Robert Mond Expedition to New Guinea and North Melanesia, and it was the research done on this expedition that was later published in Argonauts of the Western Pacific. In later years Dr. Malinowski taught at the University of London, at Cornell University, and at Yale University. (Amazon)

In his handling of science, magic, and religion, Malinowski essentially accepted the traditional Western conception of a dual reality-the reality of the natural world, grounded in observation and rational procedures that lead to mastery, and supernatural reality, grounded in emotional needs that give rise to faith. Unlike Frazer, for example, Malinowski derived science not from magic but from man's capacity to organize knowledge, as demonstrated by Trobriand technical skills in gardening, shipbuilding, etc. In contrast, he treated magic, which coexisted with these skills, as an organized response to a sense of limitation and impotence in the face of danger, difficulty, and frustration. Again, he differentiated between magic and religion in defining magical systems as essentially pragmatic in their aims and religious systems as self-fulfilling rituals organized, for example, around life crises.