"I shall invite my readers,"--so writes Malinowski--"to
step outside the closed study of the theorist into the open
air of the Anthropological field . . . " The "Anthropologi-
cal field" is almost always the Trobriand Islands. Following
Malinowski, we are soon "paddling on the lagoon, watch-
ing the natives under the blazing sun at their garden work,
following them through the patches of jungle; and . . . on
the winding beaches and reefs, we shall learn about their
life." The life we learn about is both Trobriand life and
the life of common humanity. The criticism so often lev-
eled at Malinowski that he generalized from a single case
loses much of its force if the assumption may be admitted
that there are a common human nature and a universal
culture pattern. No writer ever better justified the assump-
tion. We may learn much of all societies from a single
society, of all men from a few men, if unusual insight is
combined with patient and prolonged study of what other
students have written about other societies.

Malinowski looks at the people, then looks back at the
books, and then looks again at the people. He does not, as
some have done, look at the people, if at all, to find there
what the books have told him he should find. The eclecti-
cism of Malinowski's theory is compelled by the fact that
the human reality to which he always returns cannot be fully
represented by any single theoretical emphasis. Consider
how, in the illuminating essay "Magic, Science and Reli-
gion" he takes account of the various views of religion which
Tylor, Frazer, Marett, and Durkheim have respectively
given, and how religion emerges in those pages more multi-
dimensional than in any single account of any one of these
other anthropologists. Religion is not only people explaining
and projecting their dreams; it is not only a sort of spiritual
electric--mana--; it is not solely to be recognized in social
communion--no, religion and magic are ways men must
have, being men, to make the world acceptable, manage-
able, and right. And we see the truth of the many-sided
view in the windings and twistings of rite and myth, work

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