A photo of Malinowski with the people of the Trobriand Island of New Guinea, a British colony. As we know from the publishing of his journal post-mortem, he himself adopted the “lonely anthropologist” persona he urged people to reject. He lived well, not ingratiated into society, and used the people around him as servants. In short, he capitalized on the colonization of these islands in order to provide interesting anthropology to his colleagues in Europe and America.
Hancock, Billy. October 1918.
“It is not a matter of dispute that social anthropology emerged as a distinctive discipline at the beginning of the colonial era, that it became a flourishing academic profession towards its close, or that throughout this period its efforts were devoted to a description and analysis — carried out by Europeans, for a European audience — of non-European societies dominated by European power. And yet there is a strange reluctance on the part of most professional anthropologists to consider seriously the power structure within which their discipline has taken shape” (Asad. 15)
Asad, Talal 1973. "Introduction," in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, pp 9-19
-LGK