A very frank exchange of views: Fighting friends and the making of a productive scholarly culture
Malinowski is regarded as the father of social anthropology,
and he rates among the great thinkers of the 20th Century (all of
whom had complicated Eastern European names).
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| Malinowski |
He is not my research subject, but I cannot ignore him. He
was the intellectual son of the Seligmans - they were his benefactors, his mentors,
encouragers, and they enabled him to take the first professorial chair in anthropology
at the London School of Economics. He needed a wage and they didn’t.
All relationships of beneficence are fraught: that was the important lesson of colonialism. and it demonstrates how charity disempowers. Entitlement lives alongside resentment, the desire
for independence, to do it alone, and an unwillingness to recognise that someone
else – parental figures – are enablers. Anyway, Malinowski’s relationship with
his doctoral supervisor Dr Charles Gabriel Seligman (known to everyone as Sligs) and Brenda Seligman, the
woman who had the big bank account, was uniquely angst driven. He lived in their house, eat at their table, and he could be their harshest critic.
