Strange mythologies: cultural and linguistic opacity in Argonauts of the Western Pacific

Abstract

During the years he spent conducting fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands, Bronislaw Malinowski became convinced that foreign cultures should be studied in their entirety, as fully integrated, “organic” structures. In what follows, I explore his attempt to achieve this objective, with regard to a specific cultural practice, in Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). I begin by discussing his use of certain tropes, discursive techniques, and narratorial modes that are more often associated with the genres of travel writing and adventure fiction. I then address his conviction that even the most mundane features of social and cultural life carry ethnographic value, allowing the anthropologist to produce a comprehensive overview of any given culture. As I argue, however, this totalizing impulse is frustrated on more than one occasion in Argonauts, when Malinowski encounters various “opacities” that cannot be so easily assimilated into ethnographic discourse, thus revealing the limits of the very omniscience that he claims to be pursuing.