Radcliffe-Brown was often criticized for failing to consider the effect of historical changes in the societies he studied, in particular changes brought about by colonialism, but he is now considered, together with Bronisław Malinowski, as the father of modern social anthropology.
While attending the university he became ill and, while recuperating, decided to be an anthropologist as a result of reading James Frazer's The Golden Bough.
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Upon his return to England after the war he published his main work Argonauts of the Western Pacific which established him as one of the most important anthropologists in Europe of that time.
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The Australian government nonetheless provided him with permission and funds to undertake ethnographic work within their territories and Malinowski chose to go to the Trobriand Islands, in Melanesia where he stayed for several years, studying the indigenous culture.
Bronisław Malinowski | Bronisław Huberman | Marian Bronisław Tomaszewski | Jacek Malinowski | Bronisław, Radziejów County | Bronisław Piłsudski | Bronisław, Mogilno County |
With Władysław Markiewicz and others, Kłoskowska co-edited a multi-volume Polish complete edition of Bronisław Malinowski's works which appeared 1984-1990.
Margaret Archer (2004) in a revised edition of her classic work Culture and Agency, argues that the grand idea of a unified integrated culture system, as advocated by early Anthropologists such as Bronisław Malinowski and later by Mary Douglas, is a myth.
They organized long ceremonial voyages on their primitive type of canoes to maintain their traditional system of inter-island trade relationship, which in some ways resembled the 'kula' of the Trobriand Islands, as described by Malinowski (1922) in his book Argonauts of the Western Pacific.
Layard in Atchin and his contemporary Bronisław Malinowski in the Trobriand Islands of New Guinea were the first modern anthropologists to use what is today called participant observation methods in ethnographic research.