MACEDOŃSKIE TROBRIANDY. JÓZEF OBRĘBSKI I PIERWSZE BADANIA WSI EUROPEJSKIEJ W PARADYGMACIE FUNKCJONALIZMU
MACEDONIAN TROBRIAND ISLANDS. JÓZEF OBRĘBSKI AND THE FIRST FUNCTIONALIST RESEARCH OF THE EUROPEAN VILLAGE

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the beginnigs of the scientific career of Józef Obrębski (1905-1967), a student of Malinowski and Polish precursor of ethnic, gender and postcolonial studies. His works, although extremely innovative at his time, remained mostly unpublished and thus Obrębski remains unknown in the anthropological mainstream. Obrębski conducted field research in Orthodox peasant communities in Macedonia in the early 1930s. He was the first anthropologist who applied Malinowski’s ethnographic field method together with his functionalist theory to European village. Obrębski, seeking for his Trobriand Islands among Macedonian highlanders, analysed social structure and ritual in the researched communites in terms of gender relations. He focused on the social, economic and symbolic contexts of marital law (such as, for instance, bridewealth, marriage by eloption or sexual relations). Using the method of „objective observation and direct experience”, as he called it, he also researched witchcraft and the secret practices of love magic as well as other rituals performed by women in the terms of both gender power struggle and cooperation. Due to the events of the World War II and his subsequent emigration from Poland he failed to complete and publish his Macedonian field monographs. The author of this paper aims to reintroduce Obrębski’s work to the contemporary anthropology by preparing a critical edition of his writings.

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