White Suit, Black Notebooks: (Un)Disclosed Diaries of Bronislaw Malinowski and Martin Heidegger
This paper brings the analysis of the controversial parts of A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term by Bronislaw Malinowski and Black Notebooks by Martin Heidegger. Although the Polish-British anthropologist and the German philosopher did not influence each other during their lifetimes, they share...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of Zadar
2025-06-01
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| Series: | [sic] |
| Online Access: | http://www.sic-journal.org/ArticleView.aspx?aid=798 |
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| Summary: | This paper brings the analysis of the controversial parts of A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term by Bronislaw Malinowski and Black Notebooks by Martin Heidegger. Although the Polish-British anthropologist and the German philosopher did not influence each other during their lifetimes, they share many characteristics as authors who introduced paradigmatic changes in the field of twentieth-century human sciences. These include spatial displacement woven into their thoughts and theories, an inclination toward family life alongside engagement in polyamory, and posthumously published diaries and personal notes. The latter makes a problematic spot in human sciences as they reveal the racist and even misogynous side of Malinowski and the antisemitic sentiments of Heidegger.Keywords: Malinowski, Heidegger, Black Notebooks, diary, Hutt, Tent“Exterminate all the brutes” is probably one of the most infamous phrases from the novel Heart of Darkness (1899), written by Polish author Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, better known as Joseph Conrad. As part of a report, which was written by the commander of a trading post in Central Congo, Mr. Kurtz, upon request from “International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs” (49), this literary phrase directly reflects a very real colonial attitude toward indigenous people and their customs, the “inferior races,” one that also included enslavement, physical punishment, mutilation, and killing (Lindquist ix-x). This is why the anthropologists and wider research community were unpleasantly surprised by the affirmative tone of this phrase, which Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski wrote in his field diary on the 21st of January 1915 during his stay at Trobriand Islands: “On the whole my feelings toward the natives are decidedly tending to ‘Exterminate the brutes’” (Diary 69). Titled A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term and published in 1967 upon the initiative of this second wife, Valetta Malinowska, twenty-five years after the sudden death of the father of modern anthropology, the diary was described as brutally frank and controversial (Firth, “Introduction” xvii) and as a “revealing document with its mixture of stimulus, dullness, pathos and outrageousness“ (Firth, “Second” xxi). Although the mention of “brute extermination” was enough to unsettle the readers well aware of the irreplaceable role of the Polish-British researcher in shaping new ethical, epistemological, and conceptual paradigms in social and human sciences (Gellner 143), frustration in these scientific fields was further fueled by a range of other remarks about the life of the natives, the frequent and repetitive use of derogatory term nigrowie, and lascivious, almost misogynistic comments about women and girls in his private notes. It is these notes that are the focus of discussion in this paper. Of course, Malinowski is not alone in his outbursts of animosity and intolerance toward the communities of ‘Others’ in a broader research field. The private notes of some researchers have turned out to be a blind spot in the human sciences, a sort of both a source and a reservoir of “antihuman” attitudes and ideas; in this regard, anthropology stands alongside other disciplines. |
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| ISSN: | 1847-7755 |