On Bronislaw Malinowski
Malinowski may have wished for his diary to be revealed posthumously in order to contest the intense focus on the scientific method, adopted in his time. The unveiling of Bronislaw Malinowski’s diary overthrows the dominance of explanations of social fact based solely on determinism, paving the way for what becomes known, during the 1960s, as the discursive turn. The diary offers insight into Malinowski’s impulse of vitality, along the existential concerns and narratives of personal experience, which are excised in the process of rewriting known to transform field notes into the type of formal expression that characterizes monographs. The anthropologist writes monographs for contemporaries by responding to their expectation of accounts backed by scientific evidence in a way that fosters concealment through censorship, automatisms and the larger category of subjectivity, as well as the possible time-relegation of the Other, which may result in discrimination against him. A positive public persona is stylized out of professional concern for properly staging the native-as-text. It is hypothesized that Malinowski possible future publication of the journal intends to compose its entries so as to make a posthumous contribution to anthropology. If that is true, the journal is the space where strategies of self-showing come to the fore, revealing the author’s assumed vulnerability. The unveiling of life experience is not the product of chaotic interior monologue or brooding, but has an end-goal which is to unveil, through the mode of avowal, the anthropologist-as-text. It was once thought that the anthropological system of truth is based on theoretical writing. Now, however diary is highlighted. Malinowski’s legacy rests foremost upon the sophistry used to reorder the system of truth between theoretical and intimate writing, between the monograph and the diary.  This reordering of truths is accomplished through Writing in Schein, which is my idiom referring to the textual play with components of discourse intended to produce beautiful constructs inspired by shining images in Apollonian art. Writing in Schein is then the dissemination of appearances, which amplifies the crisis of representation between the copy that imitates, and the simulacrum that invents, since the sophistry required to align elements of discourse is a mad literary simulation.  Through the single act of the diary and its unveiling planned for posterity, Malinowski destroys the sequence of productive activity in anthropology.
Writing in Schein discours mimesis imitatio simulacra inventio ars combinatoria dissimulation Malinowski Firth Leach Young Witkiewicz monograph diary discourse creation text-play concealment unveiling rewriting culture-as-text anthropologist-as-text Sheinschrift symulakrum innovatio