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While Moore is to be commended for touching on the efforts of women's circles and non-government organisations in mediating and acting for peace, his reliance on media sources means some stories of confrontation that might have been gained from an approach based on more direct research are not included. His methodology also causes him to miss some of the more intriguing points oflocal involvement, such as the significant influence wielded by the Melanesian Brotherhood as mediators in the conflict. Nevertheless, Moore does an exceptional job of weaving together influences in the conflict, past and present, while maintaining a coherent textual flow that will be engaging and highly informative for both scholars and a more general audience searching for insight into the causes of the conflict. As the book was published shortly after the end of fighting, Moore leaves his analysis open-ended, wisely noting that the 2003 RAMSI'intervention does not mark a clear end to the core problems at the heart ofthe crisis. This is particularly relevant given that RAMSI still maintains a presence in the country. It remains to be seen whether further developments will come about with the upcoming national election, set for early 2006.

Moore has been doing research in the Solomons for almost 30 years. He is currently at work on both a history of Mala ita and a historical dictionary of the Solomon Islands, which was inspired by the challenges he faced while writing Happy Isles.

YOUNG, Michael W: Malinowski: Odyssey of an Anthropologist, 1884-1920. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004. xxix + 690 pp., bib, figs, index, maps, photos. Price: A$87.95, NZ$93.95 (cloth).

lRABASHKOW University of Virginia

This long-awaited first volume of Michael Young's monumental biography of Bronislaw Malinowski takes us from his birth in Poland through his legendary fieldwork on the Trobriand Islands. The volume ends with Malinowski sailing from Australia for England, where he will establish himself as a dominant figure in the emerging discipline of social anthropology. Leading up to this juncture is the story of the anthropologist's youth: his upbringing and travels, his friendships and love affairs, his studies, influences and research. We come to know a young man who is vain, hypochondriac, ambitious, erotic and self-tormenting, but also impressively heterodox, demonstrably brilliant and protean in his talents. Malinowski's penchant for posturing makes him an unreliable informant about his own life. But Young probes carefully for the truth behind the man's self-portrayals and helps us see how their distortions can be revealing of his personality. For example, in his own accounts of his childhood and the experiences that led him to the study of anthropology, Malinowski curiously avoids ever mentioning his father, even though Lucjan Malinowski was himself a university professor, eminent linguist, text-COllecting folklorist and methodologically astute ethnographic fieldworker, all of which his son would become. Malinowski's father was absent for long periods and died when Bronislaw was 14.

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The junior Malinowski disliked his father, seeing him as a rival, and apparently also considered that "following in one's father's footsteps" was too pedestrian a theme for his own biography, one that would have compromised the heroic self-creation that was a premise of the self-serving mythology of the pioneering ethnographer that he fashioned for himself (p.17).

We learn much in this book that is new about Malinowski the fieldworker. Although he famously invited his readers to imagine a fieldworker romantically dropped offby boat "alone on a tropical beach close to a native village" (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, pA), he himself disembarked on the Trobriand island ofKiriwina on the jetty of an efficiently-governed, colonial settlement. Prison labourers carried his "sixty boxes and cases" to the house of the resident magistrate, Dr. Raynor Bellamy, who at first graciously lent Malinowski his own bedroom (while Bellamy slept under the dining room table!) (Malinowski, p.383). The political and practical conditions facilitating Malinowski's fieldwork were largely owing to Bellamy's efforts; indeed, it was Bellamy who lent him the "ethnographer's tent" that, pitched in the village and photographed by a white trader, has long served as the famous icon of his fieldwork myth (p.389). One of Malinowski 's first principles of method was that the ethnographer should "live without other white men, right among the natives" (Argonauts of the Western Pacific, p.6). But as Young reveals, Malinowski grossly exaggerated the amount of time he actually dwelt in his tent. In fact, he spent nearly half his time on Kiriwina enjoying the hospitality of white traders, and his letters describing his intense relationships with the traders attribute to them a psychological richness that contrasts with the "thin caricatures" Malinowski drew of his native friends from Kiriwina (Malinowski, pA99). Addressing the controversy over Malinowski's use of the racist term niggers in his letters and diary, Young suggests that he had internalised the bigotry ofthe traders' society, adopting with it their abusive vocabulary (whose coarseness exceeded that of colonial officers) and aligning himself with their white supremacist views in outrageous passages expressing pique at "spoilt natives" and openly advocating "the institution of flogging the niggs" (pp.549-50). Through extensive archival research, Young pieces together the back-story to these and other infamous Diary passages, including Malinowski's outbursts ofloathing and "hatred for the niggers" (p.538), his dreams in which worldly ambitions to honours and titles crawled upon him "like lice" (p.567) and his tormented confessions of desire for native girls, several of whom he "pawed" (p.547).

This is no hagiography. Although Young embarked on the project at the invitation of Malinowski's daughter and enjoyed unrestricted access to privately-held family papers and interviews, he does not flinch from pursuing unflattering themes like Malinowski's opportunism, paranoia, racism and homoerotic narcissism-this last apparent in an "inadvertently comical" dream he recorded in which he had homosexual sex with his own double! (p.548). The views of Malinowski's contemporary detractors, such as J.H.P. Murray and Baldwin Spencer, are aired, as are tl1e unflattering opinions expressed about him by natives as well as whites on the Trobriands. Years later, local whites would remember Malinowski as the "anthrofoologist" (his subject was "anthrofoology"), while the Kiriwinans gave him the vernacular name Tosemwana,

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the "Show-Off' (pp.397, 528). Tellingly, when Malinowski departed from the field, the event was marked by no native ceremony, and his Diary entry is mean-spirited: "I am glad that the Oburaku niggers are behind me, and that I'll never again live in this village" (p.S27). Yet in fabulations of village lore reported by subsequent ethnographers, the people ofKiriwina generously tell of his departure as it should have been, with a grand farewell feast and Malinowski himself distributing elaborate parting gifts, until he boarded the boat that would take him away, and the people wailing as if mourning (p.S3G). Young observes that, like many another anthropologist, Malinowski seems to have found a field site that mirrored him: it was "a society of tricksters and 'show-offs' with interesting sex lives" who were mythmakers, too (p.SI G).

What is the meaning of this biography for Malinowski's historical reputation? For the full answer to that question, we must of course await Volume Two. But in the meantime what is perhaps most remarkable about Young's vast narrative is that, even as it implicitly answers the more recent literature on Malinowski's stupendous flaws, it maintains an overarching quality of empathetic understanding, so that one also comes away from reading it with an enhanced appreciation of his accomplishments. Malinowski resolves into a figure of Rabelaisian moods and immense contradictions, who on his good days restlessly struggled to create new forms of integrity in experience and expression. Driven by the characteristically modernist ambition to transcend legacies of the past, he frequently pushed the limits of bourgeois respectability, toyed with sexual and class (if not racial) mores, and set aside tired academic conventions. In fieldwork, he popularised an alternative to the older just-the-facts approach, re-evaluated the "dread ofleading questions" (PA29), powerfully confirmed the importance of learning the language, and revised the centrality of memory ethnography by emphasising eyell-witnessing: the need to see things first hand. Like a dutiful student, he brought along to the field the standard anthropologist's kit of skull callipers and skin-colour measuring instruments, but once there he renounced physical anthropology and "collected not a jot of the anthropometric data" (p.398). With his boundless capacity for painstaking work and "craftsman's interest" in doing things well (p.S68), he industriously revisited all his field notes weeks or months after writing them, "checking the statements and correcting his initial observations" in an impressively rigorous process he called "controlling" (pAGG). When Young read over his field notebooks, he encountered on many pages the word "controlled" pencilled in, together with a date and the informant's name or initials, like a seal of veracity. Malinowski did not achieve in his work all the innovative aims he envisioned. For example, in his initial design for a Kiriwina monograph, he wrote a "few dozen pages" of notes for an ambitious appendix called "Black and White" that would re-situate the material of the main chapters in relation to colonial change, which he noted was a topic conventionally "ignored or glossed over" by anthropologists at the time (pA7G). Nevertheless, he wound up confining his Trobriand publications almost entirely to the "traditional" culture, exactly like the antiquarian schools of ethnology he liked to criticise (p.SGS). It was left for Young himself to finally contextualise Malinowski's ethnography in colonial race relations and change.

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Young pulled out all the stops in researching this work. His massively comprehensive archival research took him over a decade, and he visited all the locations that framed major episodes in his subject's life. His judicious readings of sources are informed by his own ethnographic and historical expertise on the region, yielding an account richly saturated with linguistic detail and cultural insight. Young's biography of Malinowski is exemplary in that it offers a narrative of an anthropologist's fieldwork that develops perspectives other than the anthropologist's own. It is by any measure a magnificent scholarly achievement that will surely stand as definitive. With it, Young brings the scholarship on the young Malinowski to a level of completion beyond which it is hard to know what else there is to say.