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When it was first published (in 1967, posthumously), Bronislaw Malinowski's diary, covering the period of his fieldwork in 1914-1915 and 1917-1918 in New Guinea and the Trobriand Islands, set off a storm of controversy. Many anthropologists felt that the publication of the diary—which Raymond Firth describes as "this revealing, egocentric, obsessional document"—was a profound disservice to the memory of one of the giant figures in the history of anthropology. Almost certainly never intended to be published, Malinowski's diary was intensely personal and brutally honest. He kept it, he said, "as a means of self-analysis." Reviews ranged from "it is to the discredit of all concerned that the diary has now been committed to print" to "fascinating reading."

Malinowski presents in this book his definitive statement of the theory of functionalism. As the essential clue to the understanding of human behavior, primitive and civilized, he analyzes the functional principle that culture is an examination of the fundamentals of anthropology for the purpose of constructing a generalsystem to explain the facts of culture by this principle.