Welcome to a portal for all things Trobriand

Academic texts * Narratives * Analyses * Photography

More than 100 years ago in a fortuitous meeting of mind and place,  our understanding of the commonality and diversity in human experience took a great leap forward with Bronislaw Kasper Malinowski’s encounter with the people of the Trobriand Islands.

Malinowski is generally credited to be originator and  primary advocate of  participant observation based fieldwork. His sojourns in the Trobriand Islands, and the texts which ensued, set the bar for generations of anthropologists, creating the definitive method of apprehending the "other."

Hence forth one must live in the community of study, and seek fluency in its language while participating in the imponderbillia of everyday life. Today it is very rare for a serious student of anthropology, anywhere in the world, to complete his/her studies without exposure to Trobriand ethnography.

Next best to being there is digital immersion in the vast corpus of texts stimulated by Malinowski’s adventure.

What else is here?

While our focus centers on
the Trobriands it also reaches out
to the wider cultural area
of the Massim.
You'll find:

*Academic texts

* Transcriptions and translations of Trobriand narratives

*Information about the authors of these texts

* Photographs with Trobriand content

  * Analyses created with the use of our DEPTH database

* Bibliography of Trobriand texts

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