MaIinovsIiana On Beading a Biav in lIe Slvicl Sense oJ lIe Tevn Ov lIe SeIJ MuliIalion oJ

FvoJessov Hsu
AulIov|s) Ednund LeacI
Souvce BAIN, No. 36 |FeI., 1980), pp. 2-3
FuIIisIed I Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
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COMMENT
As RAIN reaches its sixth birthday,
two points about editorial policy may
be made:
1. With the same aims as a good salad,
to be slim and crisp, RAIN seems fit to
survive 'the decade of scarcity'. We believe
that most things worth saying in the
1980's can be said in a short article with
references. We ask contributors to emulate
the style of Maine or Lucy Mair rather
than those of Frazer or Levi-Strauss.
2. 'Understand the great powers by
reading history, but understand the
Third World through literature, which
reveals what the social sciences con-
spire to obscure'. This rebuke is thrown
out by a professor of history, J. R. Vin-
cent1, in a recent TLS article; he
continues by decrying 'development
theory' as 'a body of economic thought
which proceeds as though the issues in
the most politically and religiously con-
scious societies of the world could be
treated in secular tenns'. Social anthro-
pology has not subscribed to that fallacy.
But its influence has not been strong
enough. Some of the weaknesses are
institutional: RAIN ought to be able to
help anthropological institutions become
stronger, both in Britain and worldwide.
J.B.
1. 'Viewpoint', TLS, 21 December 1979,
p. 157.
MALINOWSKIANA
ON READING A DIAR YIN THE
STRICT SENSE OF THE TERM:
OR THE SELF MUTILATION OF
PROFESSOR HSU
Paris fashions in structuralist and post-
structuralist literary criticism with their
contrived terminology, sexy in-jokes,
and private feuding are probably not muc
to the taste of readers of either RAIN
or the American Anthropologist but,
in one respect at least, they represent a
salutary innovation. In the past, pub-
lished texts have frequently been treated
as if they were telephone lines by means
of which a reader has direct access to the
mental processes of an original author.
By contrast, Jacques Derrida and his
compatriots treat author, text, and reader
as separate entities. No doubt the text
is what it is because of the conscious
intentions and unconscious motivations
of the author but any significance which
the reader extracts from the text at a
later point in time is put there by himself.
There is no necessary connection between
what the text means to the reader and
what it originally meant to the author.
A clear example of this kind of trans-
formational discontinuity has just been
provided by the publication of Profes-
sor Hsu's 1978 Presidential Address to
the A.A.A. in which he delivered a savage
attack on the 'ethnocentricism' of Malin-
owski as supposedly revealed in the
pages of the now notorious A Diary in
the Strict Sense of the Term (1967).
It is quite clear that the 'Malinowski'
whom Professor Hsu has thus dis-
covered is a dummy, invented by Hsu
himself, which bears hardly any rela-
tionship to the flesh and blood Malin-
owski who wrote the original diaries and
who at one time Hsu's teacher.
CULTURAL BIAS
by
MARY DOUGLAS
R.A.I. Occasional Paper, ?2.50 post
paid, 25% discount to Fellows.
That this might be so could be sus-
pected in any case since the Malinowski
whom Hsu describes as pp. 529-30 of
his paper, on the basis of his personal
recollection (which is also mine), is
strikingly unlike the 'Malinowski' who
has been denounced on pp. 517-26 on
the basis of citations from A Diary ...
But close attention to Hsu's methodolog
will show just how such discrepancies
arise.
Throughout his paper Hsu writes as
if the English text of A Diar ... which
he is dissecting was written by Malin-
owski. The reality is not so simple.
A Diary ... consists of English trans-
lations of two separate journals:- (1)
20 Sept 1914-3 April 1915. At the end
of this period Malinowski had not yet
begun his Trobriand researches; (2)
28 October 19 17-18 July 1918, by whict
time he is tired and ill and longing to
get away from fieldwork altogether.
Neither document covers the period
May 1915-May 1916 which was
central to Malinowski's main Trobriand
fieldwork. On the basis of such spas-
modic evidence Hsu feels entitled to
assure us that 'Malinowski never seemed
to relate to his natives as human beings
who might be his equals and trusted
colleagues' (p. 521).
But even if we ignore their incom-
pleteness what do these journals really
say?
Both documents were 'written in
Polish with frequent use of English,
words and phrases in German, French,
Greek, Spanish and Latin and terms
from native languages - Malinowski's
handwriting was difficult to read. Often
in the case of half legible words, it was
not clear which language they were
from' (p. 299). So far as possible the
original text was first translated into plain
English by Norbert Guterman, whose
competence was in Polish, assisted by
Mario Blick - a diligent library worker
with no first hand knowledge of
Melanesia. Finally Malinowski's widow,
Valetta Malinowska, tells us that 'in
correcting the proofs I have tried to
assure the closest possible adherence to
Malinowski's personal use of English
words and phrasing in which language
in the latter part of his life, he expressed
himself with such freedom.' (p. viii).
I assume that all concerned were, by
their own lights, attempting to be
honest, but there was clearly plenty of
room for misrepresentation! One such
distortion is manifest. The pages of
A
Diary ... are liberally bespattered with
italics which Hsu and others have
assumed to correspond to underlined
emphases in the original text. This is
not so. A facsimile page of the original
journal entry for Sunday 22 April 1918
and Monday 23 April 1918 is reproduced
as the frontispiece of A Diary ...
(p. ii). The comparable English text
appears at p. 260. The only underlined
expressions in the original are the first
date Niedziela 22/4 and one mi (not).
In translation the date appears as
'Sunday, 4.22' without italics but the
following expressions are italicised:
(1) just another ethn. experience, (2)
laurabada, (3) bwayma, (4) wagas, (5)
niggers, (6) cove, (7) supposed theft of,
(8) a flash of insight, (9) not, (10) niggers,
(1 1) kayaku. The editorial practice is
consistent but misleading. Reference to
the facsimile page shows that: (1), (6),
(7), (8) are italicised because they were
written in English in the original; (9)
because it was underlined in the
original; (2), (3), (4), (I 1) because
they are 'native words'. This leaves (5)
and (10). In both cases niggers is a
translation of 'nigrami', a Polish slang
term which certainly could not have
carried, in 1918, the special loaded
meaning which the word 'niggers' conveys
to American readers in the 1970s. Just
why niggers should always be printed in
italic in A Diary . .. is unclear. The most
generous explanation is that Guterman
thereby intended to indicate that his
translation was inexact, or perhaps
just that the word is non-standard Polish.
In any case, in the context of p. 260 of
A Diary..., the word 'nigrami' would
seem to have meant nothing more
contentious than 'blacks'!
Hsu does not cite this particular
passage but at p. 529 he makes a great
song about a neighbouring entry which
appears at p. 272 of A Diary.. . and which
includes the phrases 'bloody nigger', 'on
the spot', 'nigger', all in italic. In
printing
the relevant quotation Hsu
adds ('emphases in original') but the
emphases are not in Malinowski's original!
By analogy with p. 260, it seems likely
that 'bloody nigger' and 'on the spot'
are printed in italic because they were in
English in the original, while the
second 'nigger' is in italic because it
again
represents the slang term 'nigra'.
In any case, the printed translation,
as interpreted by Hsu, is palpably a
radical distortion of whatever Malinow-
ski originally wrote.
Here is another example of Hsu's
method.
In the entry for 21 January 1915,
very early in Malinowski's field-working
career when he was still at Mailu, Malin-
owski chides himself for his impatience.
The English translation (p. 69) has:
'In many instances I have acted unfairly
and stupidly . . .'. Immediately before
this passage we have: 'At moments I
was furious at them, particularly
because after I gave them their portions
of tobacco they all went away. On the
whole my feelings toward the natives are
decidedly to "Exterminate the brutes".'
In A Diary. . . this last phrase is printed
in italics between quotation marks
with a capital E at the beginning. Hsu
(p. 518) quotes his passage, cuts out the
self-rebuke which follows, omits the
quotation marks and the capital letter
and adds: '(emphasis in original)'! So
much for scholarship! But in the
process of bowdlerisation Malinowski's
private ironic joke is entirely destroyed.
After all Conrad was Malinowski's model
and 'Exterminate all the brutes' is the
famous phrase with which Mr Kurtz,
the off-stage 'hero' (?) of Heart of
Darkness, deletes his benevolent seven-
teen page report to the 'International
Society for the Suppression of Savage
Customs'. Conrad's story has been
described as 'a masterpiece of the
tragedy of moral desolation and
defeated egoism'. Malinowski is making
just that point about himself.
Those who hope to read Malinowski's
private journals with intelligence need
to be educated in other fields besides
social anthropology! 'Mistah Kurtz -
he dead'.
But even without going into the liter-
ary harmonics of the matter it should
be obvious that 'Exterminate the brutes'
was written in English between quotes
in Malinowski's original text and that is
why it is printed in italic quotes in
A
Diary. . . Taken in conjunction with
what follows it seems clear, at the very
least, that Malinowski was here mocking
himself of his inexperience and bad temper
My own view has always been that
A Diary ... should not have been pub-
lished in the first place. Since it does
now exist as a printed text, the carrion
crows of anthropology are entitled
to peck it about as they choose. But those
who engage in this unsavoury activity need
to appreciate that the corpse which is
thus dissected is not that of Malinow-
ski but their own.
PF4m..-,4
T ___
Hsu, F. L. K. 1979. 'The Cultural Problem of
the Cultural Anthropologist', American
Anthropologist 81; 518-532.
Malinowski, B. 1967. A Diary in the Strict
Sense of the Term, New York: Harcourt
Brace & World.
3
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