Of all the social scientists ever supported by an Australian government, Bronislaw Malinowksi had the biggest impact on twentieth-century thought. His ‘functionalist’ theory of culture in the early 1920s – using evidence that he had collected in Australia’s New Guinea territories during World War I – challenged evolutionism. Instead of ranking cultures on a developmental scale from ‘primitive’ Them to ‘civilised’ Us, social science would strive to understand each culture in its own terms, as a particular set of strategies for meeting universal material needs and psychological drives. Malinowski proposed a humanism that could stare Freud in the face and accommodate the moral catastrophe of 1914–18.
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