Abstract

ROCKWELL, Elsie. Rereading The Argonauts in light of current reflections. Anthropologica [online]. 2022, vol.40, n.49, pp.261-269.  Epub Feb 27, 2023. ISSN 0254-9212.  http://dx.doi.org/10.18800/anthropologica.202202.013.

Rereading today Malinowski’s masterpiece, The Argonauts, we come across a foundational perspective of ethnographic work understood as the task of being “chroniclers” of alien realities, and at the same time we come across certain concepts -natives, cultures, mentalities- that have been deconstructed, redefined or even dismissed among contemporary anthropologists. However, his descriptions of the «imponderables of real life» remain a valid model of how to graphically account for the complexity of the undocumented realities we study, including our own. I return in this essay to the words of several contemporary anthropologists who would agree with Malinowski that the «ultimate goal is to enrich... our own vision of the world», but who also emphasize the centrality of personal experience in ethnographic work, as well as the need to historicize our ethnographic descriptions, two aspects that were not considered in The Argonauts.

Keywords : ethnography; The Argonauts; historization; personal experience.

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