Magic, Science and Religion [RARE BOOKS]

Magic, Science and Religion AND OTHER ESSAYS by BRONISLAW MALINOWSKI with an introduction by Robert Redfield

No writer of our times has done more than Bronislaw Malinowski to bring together in a single comprehen- sion the warm reality of human living and the cool abstractions of science. Malinowski's gift was double: it consisted both in the genius given usually to artists and in the scientist's power to see and to declare the universal in the particular.

This volume includes three of the great anthropol ogist's most famous essays.

In "Magic, Science and Religion" he takes account of the various views of religion which Tylor, Frazer, Marett, and Durkheim have given and goes on from there to provide his own conception in which re ligion is not only a matter of explaining and project- ing one's dreams, nor simply of social communion, but religion and magic are ways men have-men being men to make the world acceptable, manage able, and right. The essay "Myth in Primitive Psy- chology" makes myths part of the meaning and func tion of the life of the people who tell them. The final essay, "Baloma; the Spirits of the Dead in the Tro- briand Islands," reveals the basis of Malinowski's functional point of view the theory that types of social behavior must be analyzed for the need each of them fills in maintaining man and his society.