Rereading The Argonauts in light of current reflections

Abstract

Rereading today Malinowski’s masterpiece,  The Argonauts, we come across a foundational perspective of ethnographic work understood as the task of being “chroniclers” of alien realities, and at the same time we come across certain concepts —natives, cultures, mentalities— that have been deconstructed, redefined or even dismissed among contemporary anthro-pologists.  However,  his  descriptions  of  the  «imponderables  of  real  life» remain a valid model of how to graphically account for the complexity of the undocumented realities we study, including our own. I return in this essay to  the  words  of  several  contemporary anthropologists  who  would  agree with Malinowski that the «ultimate goal is to enrich... our own vision of the world», but who also emphasize the centrality of personal experience in ethnographic work, as well as the need to historicize our ethnographic descriptions, two aspects that were not considered in The Argonauts.